If you've ever tried to
send a link to an Amazon product detail page to your friends via
email, you know what a hassle those long Amazon URLs can be. Most
email programs wrap the text at 72 characters and end up breaking the
URL, often making it unusable. Next time, instead of copying and
pasting the URL exactly as you see it, try cropping it a bit so the
lines won't wrap. Here's what a URL copied directly from Amazon looks
like:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0596004478/qid%3D1049157816/[RETURN]
sr%3D11-1/ref%3Dsr%5F11%5F1/104-2773718-4336742
For those of you keeping score at home, that's 114 characters! The
core piece we're looking to dig out and preserve, the ASIN , is the only bit
really needed to target the right product page. Everything after the
10-digit ASIN is garbage—session tracking and other bits and
bobs used by Amazon—when we just want to link to the page. So
we can instantly make a shorter link by removing the excess baggage:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0596004478/
That's much better. We're down to 50 characters, well within the
non-wrap zone of most email clients. But if you really want to push
the character-limit envelope, there's a little-known way (contributed
by Cyrus Durgin at Amazon) to shorten the URL even further. You can
replace exec/obidos simply with
o, as in:
http://amazon.com/o/ASIN/0596004478
That brings us down to 35 characters. (OK, so maybe taking out the
www. was cheating, but 39 is still impressive.)
Now the URL is suitable for email, instant messages, or even writing
out long-hand!
Has nice graphics and features and through the short domain realy short links.
http://yatuc.com