Why I Save Articles
Occasionally I will post an article in its entirety here because I want it for 1) future reference 2) to make fun of it or 3) whatever-reason. Is this stealing? No. Why do I say no?
I'll give you an example:
I was reading a post on Freakonomics, What Do You Do With Your Pennies? and a link in it, the first sentence in fact, had a link I wanted to see:
The Great Penny Debate continues to limp along. One hundred million pennies, collected by schoolchildren, were put on display at Rockefeller Center.
I wanted to read that article, and hoped it had a picture of the display of pennies.
All I got was the following:
Sucks, doesn't it?
I learned long ago that nothing on the Internet is forever. While there are still some PERL manuals that have had the same URL for 15+ years, you cannot trust something to be around for long.
I copy/paste articles when I want them online. I save as either .MHT or .HTM (Complete) from within the browser, or screenshot the page if needed.
Do I do it for money? Heck no. Do I do it to devalue the original authors content? Nope, not close. I do it because it's worth having.
There is a saying around my family, called 'A Jack.' Actually, there are various ways of saying it. Another is a 'Jack-ism' or "Pulling a Jack.' Jack was my fathers name, and he had a habit of being a Cliff Clavin of sorts. On that link, the phrase "…he was the king of useless trivia." hits the nail on the head, for both Cliff and my Dad.
Anytime you said something, but could not back it up you were considered to be pulling a Jack. To me, because I read a lot, I had this happen a lot.
So I save articles. If I want to reference something I have read, it may be on my site. Saved. For me. For others who may want to read it.
So don't say "Hey! That's MY content!" to me if you see something you wrote on my site. I have a valid reason, as you can see.
If we could get folks to keep the stories around, maybe I would not have to do this. I mean, WHY remove news articles? WHY? It's not like they go bad! They are history! You don't remove World War II from the history books to make room for the latest foray into Iraq. You add chapters, volumes, etc. On the web, it's all about disk space, AND SPACE IS CHEAP!
So there you have it, WHY I SAVE ARTICLES.
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