This morning I'm releasing a DaveNet piece that explains how the NY Times archive works with weblogs. I'm pointing to this post from the article to provide more information, pointers, and as a place for people to ask questions.

1. The New York Times RSS feeds, which are maintained in partnership with UserLand Software, the company I founded, and am majority shareholder of.

2. 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.

3. If you link in to the Times archive through a link generated by the Radio UserLand aggregator, or compatible software, the link will continue to work in the future, as long as there is no substantial abuse to this system.

4. The new policy began on May 5, 2003. All specially coded links pointing to articles after that date will continue to work.

5. A comment thread on the archive policy on the Harvard Law weblog.

# Posted on 6/16/03; 6:51:23 AM