Need to link to a New York Times article from your weblog? Enter your link here, and we'll give you the weblog-safe link.

What does "weblog-safe" mean?

If you look at the URLs of each of the stories, you'll see that there's information encoded after the question mark. Here's an example. The special coding tells the Times's server that the link is coming from a weblog, and now and in the future, this link will work without a fee to access the archive.

There's also a bookmarklet, but I can't include the link here (directly). The source code (in Python) is available. Basically they're just doing a database lookup.

With this, perhaps MemeStreams could normalize NYT URLs as they are blogged, so that the click-throughs continue to work later on. Alternately, they could be used on click-through, in conjunction with the redirect function.

For example: if you visit this page from 2005, entitled "A Film Offers Buckets of Blood in Three Designer Colors", you're hoping to see a review of Sin City. If you click through, you hit the walled garden and are served only the abstract. If you pass it through the link generator, you get a link that takes you through to the full text, complete with images.

New York Times Link Generator