Harriman makes news

Harriman State Park is plastered on today's front page with a big headline blaring, "FUTURE IN QUESTION?" Seems 'tis a topic on the tongues of people statewide. As I noted, our airhead governor--let's call him Butch for short--has decided on some hairbrain scheme tgo eliminate state parks and fold the agency into the Über conservation, Attilla The Hun State Lands Dept. It's a lunatic idea and it has created an uproar, espcially in Eastern Idaho where Harriman is a icon of sorts. Butch has really stirred up a nest of sleeping snakes on this one and he must be hearing the buzz of the rattles clear into his cushy office in the newly-remodeled Capitol.

Clearly, Butch's idea is nuts. However, this is Idaho and the IQ of our Legislature is dismal. You never know with this bunch--they could actually approve such an idea--they are that stupid. For those readers who are interested in this arcane but volatile and dangerous issue, I have copied today's front page article, as well as two others. One is an AP article from Boise and the other is written locally by the Rexburg newspaper.

I am trying something different here this morning. For you few techies who read this blog here are the details. First, I found the articles. So far, so good. Next, I clicked the "print" button in each article. Then, I printed then with a piece of freeware called "PDF Creator." It's a great program. This little gem then rendered each article as a standalone PDF. I retitled each article and saved to my Desktop. Then, I opened Google Document and uploaded them into "the cloud."
That's what techies call Google Docs. I have each article a consecutive number.
OK, then I went into my cloud and created a folder called "Harriman." I put all three articles inside this folder. Then I clicked the "Share" button and got a 99-character string of type to use to invite you to inspecet the contents of this folder. Tell me, please, who in their right mind will use a 99-character URL? Few, if any.

So, then I went to bit.ly and used their service to shorten the 99-character link to a mere 20 characters. That's an 80% reduction in size. Here is the newly-minted link:

http://bit.ly/76qBgd

Bit.Ly and many other link shorteners have hit the online market in the last couple of years because of Twitter. Twitter limits posts to 140 characters. Most URL's are hugely long so the link shortener people have hit a real sweet niche and are wildly popular.

If you click on the link, you will see three files--"harriman," "harriman2," and "harriman3." Click on any one or all three articles to read them. I think you will agree that this technique is fun and worthwhile and a great way to share stuff with you. Plus, as a bonus, the articles are now archived forever and won't be lost to the online ozone when the originators deletes them from their web server.