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Because I'm a geek
Jun. 17th, 2004 12:02 pmOf the rare individuals reading this journal by actually going to the front page and clicking through the entries, some of you may have noticed three new links at the bottom of the left-side linkbar. Labelled "current..." I've taken to listing the various media that I'm partaking of at the time (of the last update).
Since two of the items will be books ("current read" and "current bookclub"), I figured I'd go ahead and link to Amazon (and no, I'm not getting anything from the link).
Linking to Amazon is a bit of a pain in the ass. The fact remains that Amazon URLs, while from a coding point of view probably a huge weight lifted from their developers, are quite possibly the most user-unfriendly aspect of their site. Apart from their coders, who knows what part of the URL actually contains the portion of the site that pertains to the product you're looking at and what part will grant some anonymous surfer access to your wish list and credit card number? (yes, I'm being sardonic)
Paul Bausch, author of Amazon Hacks knows.
And he provided the following page on O'Reilly's site for creating shorter URLs to Amazon products.
Since I'm a geek, I threw together the following bookmarklet to click on when you're surfing Amazon and want to generate the short URL. It'll generate a small popup window where the short URL is easily copy-and-paste-able.
The technically-inclined might ask why I didn't just use javascript's
Since two of the items will be books ("current read" and "current bookclub"), I figured I'd go ahead and link to Amazon (and no, I'm not getting anything from the link).
Linking to Amazon is a bit of a pain in the ass. The fact remains that Amazon URLs, while from a coding point of view probably a huge weight lifted from their developers, are quite possibly the most user-unfriendly aspect of their site. Apart from their coders, who knows what part of the URL actually contains the portion of the site that pertains to the product you're looking at and what part will grant some anonymous surfer access to your wish list and credit card number? (yes, I'm being sardonic)
Paul Bausch, author of Amazon Hacks knows.
And he provided the following page on O'Reilly's site for creating shorter URLs to Amazon products.
Since I'm a geek, I threw together the following bookmarklet to click on when you're surfing Amazon and want to generate the short URL. It'll generate a small popup window where the short URL is easily copy-and-paste-able.
Link It
Edit: Since LJ apparently doesn't let you embed javascript code in a link anchor, the link goes to a page I have on my own site with the bookmarklet.
The technically-inclined might ask why I didn't just use javascript's
alert() function--Mozilla Firefox doesn't appear to allow you to copy and paste from the alertbox.
