Bug Me Not

How often do you find yourself pursuing a bit of news of interest, only to be confronted by the need to fill out a long, nosy form needed to register for a particular web site, e.g., www.nytimes.com, for instance?

It happens to me often, as I browse around 50 news sources every day. It has gotten so bad that you have to be registered to leave a comment on blogs.

There is now a way around this for many of those sites requiring lengthy registrations, only to discover the news article was less than stellar, after all. Check out bugmenot.com - just enter the URL of the offending site. If it's in the database, you'll get a plain vanilla user id and password to use to bypass registration. We're not talking about bypassing pay site registrations -- we are talking about the myriad small potatoes sites that insist on conducting their market research before you've even set sight on their wares. Give it a try -- add it to your browser's task bar shortcuts and you always have it handy.

Thanks to my favorite crabby old lady, for pointing this one out in her blog first.