Isn't it annoying when a "digger" on digg digs a web page and uses a horrible headline? Well, I've found out how you can counter that by submitting the same URL with a small hack to get the same page on the site with a better headline. I did this while trying to chime in on the digg fray around Republican 2008 US Presidential hopeful Ron Paul.
As Todd has chronicled, many diggers vehemently support Ron Paul on the site.
With all of this hubbub, I wanted to participate by submitting a link to the site calling others to make him the "Greatest Living American" since — as several search engine news sources have reported in the last several days — Stephen Colbert is no longer Google's "Greatest Living American." Google defused the recent Google bomb (think "miserable failure" and "waffle" in relation to George W. Bush and John Kerry) that placed the Comedy Central show host as the number one result for that query.
I wanted to submit one specific article about Colbert's fall with a headline calling others to help put Paul at number one. However, someone already submitted the article with only reference to Colbert, and Digg does not allow people to submit a URL more than once. Thus, I couldn't chime in on the fray as I wanted.
Here's where I made myself proud of myself. I decided to attempt submitting the article URL with a "#" appended to the end. This character is used for anchor HTML tags in the page that enable people to point others to predefined spots on a page. Not only did the URL with only the "#" work in my browser, Digg also accepted it as a different address. Violà! I got to submit the same article with a Ron Paul touting headline.
"?" and "/" also work on digg. "#" and "/"don't seem to work on reddit, but "/" does. "#", "?", and "/" all work on Netscape.
Of course, you can do more fancy stuff with this, and servers react differently to each case.
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