Avoiding getting flashed by Dilbert

I’ve been reading the Dilbert comics online for years, always from the archive page — the home page was just overwhelmingly cluttered by ads, and it required extra clicks to see previous comics when I’d missed a few days.

So when the central Dilbert site switched to a super Flash-heavy format for their homepage (including the strip itself!) and the complaints erupted, I snickered smugly.  The archive page hadn’t changed.  I wasn’t affected.

Well, it took about 2 days.  Now the central archive page redirects to dilbert.com.

Grr.  If I disable JavaScript, the site “degrades” back to showing the comic as an image, but at the moment I can’t disable JavaScript for just one site (there’s undoubtedly a Firefox plugin that’ll do it, but that won’t help non-Firefox users).

But then I noticed that the archive pages still exist: it’s just the *index* page they’re redirecting.  Well, it’s not hard to build a URL based on the date — that’s what JavaScript bookmarklets are all about!

So my archive access has returned.  Here’s my new bookmark.

Just bookmark that link, and you can access the archived strip for today (…until they break it again, anyway).  Note: if you’re checking Dilbert at 1am and they haven’t put the new strip up yet, you’ll get a 404 until they do.  There’s a simple solution to this: shut off your computer and go to bed.