Comments on: Encyclopedia Britannica articles full text

By: caleb

caleb — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 21:37:42 +0000

The RefControl Firefox extension lets you spoof a referring URL. Once installed, set http://www.britannica.com to ‘Forge’ and you’re good. that all of it’s pages are linked from britannica.com, and you’re good.

The ‘Nanotechnolgoy - Small is Beautiful’ article is not part of EB proper, but an entry from their 2005 Book of the Year. For the EB of your youth, see plain old nanotechnology.

By: eiffel

eiffel — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 06:07:26 +0000

Donn, if Britannica shows the full text when people visit an article after clicking on a link, doesn't that mean you should turn your Referer header ON instead of off? Otherwise, how will Britannica know that you came from a link?

I visited the Nanotechnology article to check this, and this time I actually read the article. What struck me is how much the style of the writing has changed since the Britannica of my youth, which would never have contained text like:

"As with any new technology, nanotechnology has characteristics that are frightening to some, and creepy little machines have already infiltrated science-fiction writing..."

By: donn

donn — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 16:21:24 +0000

After further investigation, apparently the technique described by Britannica doesn’t even work for me. I now see that I can only view certain articles in full. For example, I can’t seem to view Nanotechnology - Small is beautiful even from a link on another site. Okay I’ll stop spamming the comments now.

By: donn

donn — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 16:06:22 +0000

Hmm…maybe not. I seem to be able to read articles regardless.

By: donn

donn — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 15:54:31 +0000

I believe if you turn off sending your referer header (about:config/network.http.sendRefererHeader set to 0 in Firefox) you can browse all the articles normally.