Getting past that pesky password prompt

Ok, here's the situation... You've signed up for quite a few sites that require passwords to access some or all of their content, and you're tired of typing in your user name and password each time you get there or just can't remember the things.

Some sites use cookies to remember you, but many do not, or maybe you don't like cookies and have them turned off.

This tip shows how to create an html file which will take you right to those sites and bypass the password prompt. It works with any site which uses the url to keep track of who you are as you surf to the password protected pages.

The first step is to fire up your browser and surf to each site in turn, and type in that pesky password and user name for the last time. When you get to the next page after you click "Submit" on the log in page, click in the location box of your browser to highlight the url there... It should look quite a bit like the following one: 

    http://pagesthatpay.geocities.com/geocities/affiliates/geo_run_report?report_id_in=78&rep_firm_id_in=368191

[I've changed the numbers in the above url so you can't go run my Pages that Pay reports or mess with my account.]

The important thing you're looking for here is that the url contains some form of ? and numbers fed to a cgi program which may or may not end in the extension .cgi or some such. These numbers are what identify you to that cgi program and is the reason you are able to bypass the login page with this trick. If the url just references a plain vanilla .htm or .html file you may be out of luck for that site.

Open notepad or your favorite text editor and copy and paste the url into it. Then make it look like the following one:

<HTML><HEAD><TITLE>Run Reports</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<UL>
<LI><A HREF="http://pagesthatpay.geocities.com/geocities/affiliates/geo_run_report?report_id_in=78&rep_firm_id_in=368191">
Value America</A>
</UL>
</BODY></HTML>

Now save it with the extension .htm or .html depending on whether you have windows 3 or a newer version.

You now have a quick and dirty file which you can load in your browser anytime you want to surf to the site. Put as many repetitions of this trick in the same file to make a list of them and you'll never have to type in those passwords again.

Here's what the entry will look like when you load the file:

Note that this might not work for every site you try this with, and you may have to create an entry for each password protected page on a site. The above example is from a file I created to speed up the process of accessing traffic reports for my Geocities Pages that Pay accounts.

Before it was necessary to wade through three pages for each report I wanted to look at, now it's one click, select the dates for the report and click OK... 8-)

Further notes for the html beginner:

<UL> This means unordered list, and must be followed by </UL> after the individual list items.

<LI>   This means list item, and must be placed before each item you want to appear in the list.

<A HREF=""></A>

This in called an anchor reference and is used to create a link in an html page. Put the url of the page between the quotes, and the text you want to appear in the link between the two tags enclosed in <> marks.

C Ray Parrish, Cottage Grove, Oregon