Free file share site Opendrive (with hotlinking) + Copyscape

I needed to check an article that I was editing for plagiarism, and while Googling for snippets did yield some hits, there were patches of the file that looked suspiciously well-written (in contrast to text that was obviously original to the author). For these blocks of text, Google didn't give me helpful (contiguous) results. Meh.

The most famous site for checking this, is, of course, Copyscape.com. Though, in hindsight, I should have checked for clone sites that might have let me upload a text file for scanning, I didn't do that; I wound up slogging my way through several free file-sharing sites, but apparently all of them protect their downloads - you can't get a direct URL to the file, which was what I needed to give Copyscape. Instead, those sites dish up an HTML page with ads etc - which explained the really crazy results of my first try at Copyscape :-\
(This may sound like I'm being a bit of a cheapo, but sans a credit card, I can't sign up for the Premium service, which I think lets you simply upload a file for checking. I don't see this as being a frequent need, either, and a monthly or yearly subscription to Copyscape would probably just lie unused most of the time. So this is a worthwhile workaround for the rare case when I want to run a document through their plagiarism scanner).

Keeping up with my research, I found that the operative term that some sites used to describe this feature was "hotlink" or "hotlinking". A new search led me to Opendrive. The site info said it allowed hotlinking for free, so I signed up. Good point - they don't force you to verify your email address before letting you use the site. WARNING - bad point - use a throwaway password for this site, not a password you use anywhere else - they belong to the class of "geniuses" that mail you your username and password in their welcome mail, and will probably do the same when you change the password. Obviously, be wary of entrusting such a site with confidential data/documents as well, since the practice of mailing a password indicates (to me at least) that they have no concern for the security of your data. If it wasn't for the fact that the featureset included just what I needed, this would have turned into a rant! Grrrr...

Anyway: I uploaded a text version of the article, and then had to fumble around a bit to get hotlink (direct access):

1. In Folder Properties for My Documents (default upload folder) I changed it from 'Hidden' to 'Public'.
2. In the folder listing, below the icon for the file you want direct access to, is a "Properties | Links" hyperlink. Click that to visit the file properties page - there, you have a "Full: (download)" link for the file. I tried that URL in another browser, and voila! direct access to the text file... good to go!
3. Went back to Copyscape, and pasted this URL in. Copyscape scanned it, and gave me a (very limited) listing of possible sources - including some that Google had not. Still, this served to identify several different sources - now to get back to comparing the sources v/s the article. Copyscape helpfully highlights the common text blocks between source and your checked "page" (obviously, this is the first time I'm using Copyscape, though I remembered the name for some reason).

Well, brain-dump over, back to work. This setup can, hopefully, be used quicker and with more efficiency in the future, than I did today - nearly two hours of digging and annoyance to get the result I wanted!