How I prevent the pay wall from falling down on me.....
The NY Times has a solid business model in place. You can read an article for about a week, and then it goes behind a pay wall. This is really smart - sort of heroin dealer smart. You make someone interested in the content and then take it away so if they want to refer back to it in the future, they are stuck and they have to pay.
So how do you personally keep the content accessible? You can't bookmark it, or tag it - it wont be there when you return. You can print it (ugh, paper!) or cut and paste the contents into a word doc. Or maybe if it's short, do a print screen.
But this doesn't help you if it's July and you want to make that no-knead bread that you saw months ago in the Times but never tried...now this is probably a bad example as practically every blog in the universe that had something to do with food posted the recipe, but say they didn't. What are you supposed to do?
Want to know what I do?
Any time I see a recipe or article that I want to keep for future reference, I make a PDF. But you don't have acrobat, you say? No problem, download CutePDF (or a variety of other freeware available) and you're set.
And after that PDF is made, I can file it away in folders (recipes, house, money, family, etc.) where I can access it at a later date. And I can put it on my PDA to read in the kitchen while I'm cooking.
Some of you are out there saying "well duh", but maybe one or two of you aren't. And you can use this for just about anything you find on the web. Think of it as your way to freeze the web for a small moment.
Just a small way for me to contribute to my fellow foodies.
So how do you personally keep the content accessible? You can't bookmark it, or tag it - it wont be there when you return. You can print it (ugh, paper!) or cut and paste the contents into a word doc. Or maybe if it's short, do a print screen.
But this doesn't help you if it's July and you want to make that no-knead bread that you saw months ago in the Times but never tried...now this is probably a bad example as practically every blog in the universe that had something to do with food posted the recipe, but say they didn't. What are you supposed to do?
Want to know what I do?
Any time I see a recipe or article that I want to keep for future reference, I make a PDF. But you don't have acrobat, you say? No problem, download CutePDF (or a variety of other freeware available) and you're set.
And after that PDF is made, I can file it away in folders (recipes, house, money, family, etc.) where I can access it at a later date. And I can put it on my PDA to read in the kitchen while I'm cooking.
Some of you are out there saying "well duh", but maybe one or two of you aren't. And you can use this for just about anything you find on the web. Think of it as your way to freeze the web for a small moment.
Just a small way for me to contribute to my fellow foodies.
Labels: food, free, organization
posted by Gab at 10:44 AM
4 Comments:
You could use Google Notebook for this. It's a small firefox extension that sits at the bottom of your window, select the text, open the notebook, paste and tahdah, it's yours forever. You can have different notebooks, recipes, kids tips. you can even publish them or keep them private.
That's how I do it.
Alex, that's awesome! I had no idea that even existed (and I am a total Googler!) Thanks for the tip!
Good post.
You write very well.
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