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Saturday, January 21, 2006
Amazon.com = Ugly Address Bar
The new Recommended Software Development Books page is now available. This is the section you will find a list of books that have assisted me over the course of my career.
All of the book links lead to Amazon.com. I felt that Amazon.com URLs are long and ugly, with a face only a mommy URI could love. To solve cure this case of the uglies, I created the book.asp page.
Book.asp sits in the root of my website and accepts a single query string parameter, ASIN. The ASIN is Amazon.com's unique identifier for all of its books. Book.asp grabs the ASIN and creates a dynamic Amazon.com URL, including my associateID. Then it redirects the user to the newly created URL. Compare the two:
Ugly URL: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?link_code=as2&path=ASIN/0596006993&tag=tod1dsthought-20&camp=1789&creative=9325
Pretty URL: http://www.tod1d.net/book.asp?asin=0596006993
Eventually, I will convert book.asp from classic ASP to ASP.NET and enable URL rewriting. After which, the URL will look something like this:
Beautiful URL: http://www.tod1d.net/book/0596006993
If you feel like you get some value from this site and you would like to assist me with paying for the cost of hosting, please click on one of the books in the new section, or one of the URLs above, then purchase something from Amazon.com within the next 30 days. It does not have to be any of the books I recommend.
Content copyright ©2003-2006 Tod Birdsall
All of the book links lead to Amazon.com. I felt that Amazon.com URLs are long and ugly, with a face only a mommy URI could love. To solve cure this case of the uglies, I created the book.asp page.
Book.asp sits in the root of my website and accepts a single query string parameter, ASIN. The ASIN is Amazon.com's unique identifier for all of its books. Book.asp grabs the ASIN and creates a dynamic Amazon.com URL, including my associateID. Then it redirects the user to the newly created URL. Compare the two:
Ugly URL: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?link_code=as2&path=ASIN/0596006993&tag=tod1dsthought-20&camp=1789&creative=9325
Pretty URL: http://www.tod1d.net/book.asp?asin=0596006993
Eventually, I will convert book.asp from classic ASP to ASP.NET and enable URL rewriting. After which, the URL will look something like this:
Beautiful URL: http://www.tod1d.net/book/0596006993
If you feel like you get some value from this site and you would like to assist me with paying for the cost of hosting, please click on one of the books in the new section, or one of the URLs above, then purchase something from Amazon.com within the next 30 days. It does not have to be any of the books I recommend.