Destroying the business model for the Daily Mail: an exercise

[gominokouhai]

Obviously I never, under any circumstances, want to give the Daily Mail the benefit of my pageviews. Every time I click on a link to dailymail.co.uk I get counted and increase the value of their website to advertisers, and I don't believe the Daily Mail deserves to be considered valuable by anyone. Sometimes, however, I want to read their articles to see what kind of a car crash they've come up with this time, and this is where istyosty.com steps in.

Istyosty.com reads the Daily Mail so you don't have to; saving a cached version of the page so that it only gets viewed once on the Mail's server, and can then be pointed/laughed at at our leisure elsewhere. The cached version, when viewed, might have comments that are out of date, but seriously, nobody reads Mail comments.

It occurred to me that it might be nice to have a browser plugin that automatically redirects all Mail traffic to the appropriate cached page. Thus, between bouts of providing the best customer service in Edinburgh, I have spent today hacking Javascript, by far the ugliest programnming language known to mankind. Halfway through the process I discovered that istyosty provide their own browser extension that already does it, but by now I am in blood stepp'd in so far, returning were as tedious as go o'er.

I will get this damn thing to work. Once it's done I'll probably install the official version instead, but this has become personal now. So far it installs properly, but doesn't actually work. I'm learning things about variable scoping that I really hoped I'd never need to know.

Still, it beats doing real work.

Comments

[burkesworks]

Of course, once you've opened your link to the Stuermer via istyosty, the pain of the experience is much relieved if like me you run Greasemonkey under Firefox and install this script.

[gominokouhai]

Eeeexcellent.