News Archives?

Does anyone know a good resource for archived news stories? I'm looking for something like the Common Dreams News Center where archives are categorized by date and you can scan all the headlines from a given month or date range. In fact, the Common Dreams site is exactly what I'm looking for, but the selection of stories is too limited. Lexis offers archives of wire service stories and major newspapers, but the only way I know to reach them is through a targeted search and since I only vaguely know what I'm looking for during a certain time period I just want to browse headlines in that period. Many newspapers offer archives of their news stories, but they want you to pay for access and, again, the only way to reach the archives is through keyword searches rather than by date ranges. So, if you know of a resource where AP or Reuters or Knight-Ridder wire stories are archived by date range (like a blog would do it), please send me a link. Please? Pretty please? You'll be doing me a big favor! p.s.: This makes me think it would really be worthwhile for someone to start a blog where they just copied all the headlines from a major newspaper (or maybe BBC news—someplace where the archives are freely accessible) into a day's post w/links to the articles. Then, when people have research needs like mine, they could go to that blog, find the appropriate date(s), then scan the headlines for that date and access the articles they wanted. I bet this is out there, somewhere, I just don't know where...

Posted 04:06 PM | Comments (5) | life generally

Comment Spam Killer?

Six Apart, the makers of Movable Type, are supporting a new collaborative effort to get rid of comment spam using a “nofollow” attribute. More here and here. Download the plugin here. I've already installed it. The directions are a little vague on which directories the files are supposed to go into, but it seems to be working. If you view the source on a comments window, you'll see any links in the comments are followed by the “rel=nofollow” tag. Cool. At this point, I'll happily try just about anything (short of eliminating comments altogether) to reduce the amount of spam I get. Since I upgraded MT-blacklist and installed the MT-DSBL plugin, the spam seems to have decreased dramatically, but some still gets through occasionally. Unfortunately, the side effect has been that at least one person who wanted to comment wasn't able to because the comment was blocked by Blacklist or the DSBL filter. It would be great if comment spammers lost their incentive to spam so I could remove those filters and thereby avoid that problem. Is this “nofollow” thing the silver bullet we've all been hoping for? Maybe I won't have to implement s-code after all. UPDATE: For the record, I just checked yesterday's logs and on the last day before I implemented the “nofollow” plugin, this MT install received 3,827 hits to its comment script. I assume that number will drop if the “nofollow” thing actually discourages comment spammers. We'll see.

Posted 06:34 AM | meta-blogging