Pick Up Your Mail

September 7, 2005

I listened to an interesting article on NPR yesterday about the Astrodome in Houston, TX, which mentioned that it now has a fully operational post office that manages mail for the refugees. The entire building has its own zip code: 77230. Of course, in appropriate NPR fashion, the snippit of music that followed the "article" was Such Great Heights, by The Postal Service, no less.

In other news, while looking up the new zip code (I hadn't memorized it), I noticed a curious thing about a news website. I found the info by searching for "astrodome zip code" in Google News. One of the linked pages had a short article about the temporary post office there. However, when I returned to the site by entering the URL directly, I got a lovely registration page on the same URL as before. As it turns out, the page gave me the news without registration as long the HTTP request had the "referer" (sic) header set to "http://news.google.com/" ... quite nice indeed! Now I'm off to see if this works on any other registration-only sites.

Update: yep, it does. I tried an AJC article: casual clicking on their own site gives me a registration page; adding the Google News "referer" header gives me the article itself. It also turns out that the zip code link bypasses registration for any "referer", but the AJC requires it be Google News (and possibly other news aggregators).