Ebay references

[Roger Merchberger]

Rumor has it that Vintage Computer Festival may have mentioned these words:
>On Mon, 3 Oct 2005, Gil Carrick wrote:
>
> > For whatever it's worth, when citing eBay auctions all that is necessary is
> > the item number. In this case, 8701459056. It is very easy to find on any
> > page and cut-n-paste into an email. A search for that number will find it
> > quickly. Full URLs always get wrapped in an inconvenient place.
>
>Indeed.  Now I wish someone would explain why eBay went from a nice, clean
>and SANE URL to the big catastrophe they now make you link to.

ePay's URLs haven't been 'small' for quite a while, but they were always 
pretty easy to shrink to oneliners... did it all the time.

> > http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Nimbus-Domesday-Video-Book_W0QQitemZ8701
> > 459056QQcategoryZ4193QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

Which I shrunk to:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/_W0QQitemZ8701459056

and it worked just fine. Just whack everything between the domain and the 
underscore, and everything after the listing #. [1] Geepers, that ain't 
rocket surgery... ;^>

[1] Which is pretty much what I did with the old URLs too, but they used to 
be much longer than that.

Laterz,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger

--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger  --  SysAdmin, Iceberg Computers
zmerch at 30below.com

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