Friday, November 18, 2005

Emirates Today

The newspaper, Emirates Today, has been around now for over a month. In terms of content it's already established itself as a credible alternative to Gulf News and Khaleej Times. But I would not go beyond that at this point.

You don't find me linking to its articles because Emirates Today does not make it possible to see the link addresses to their articles or to cut and paste text from them. It's not blog friendly. Perhaps the intent is to guarantee they are reaching online readers unfiltered, to maintain control over how their articles are presented, and to ensure that if an article is read it is read along with the ads. Whether it's intentional or not, it's clear that one side effect is that fewer people are steared to the online version of the paper.

UPDATE: Secret Dubai, in this post, is able to link so it is possible, just not obvious or transparent.

3 Comments:

Blogger Keef said...

Using my super-human web-designer skills to help you out here. They have the nasty 'disable-right-click' script there. I hate sites that do that! And all the stories open in a chromeless window (chrome is all the shiny stuff like nav bars, status bars etc). Anyway, here's a way around it. Click anywhere in the page that you're on. Go ctrl-A (select all), ctrl-C (copy), crtl-N (open in new window). This should open the stuff you selected in a new window with all the chrome, so you can see the URL for the page. Copy and paste that as the URL for your link.

8:44 PM  
Blogger secretdubai said...

The nice thing is that Firefox (at least in the Mac version) allows you to customise Javascript preferences, so you can disallow this particular function (right click blocking).

I don't understand why websites do this. It's pointless. There are a dozen ways to get around it:

1. Print Screen
2. Rip your cache
3. Disable javascript
4. Use Safari

etc etc etc. I mean wtf is the point?

I don't think those links work permanently for Emirates Today though, like they do for GN, KT and 7Days.

10:15 PM  
Blogger samuraisam said...

i just use maxthon.
it uses the internet explorer engine, but even pop-ups have a tab, so the URL is shown.

1:47 PM  

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