Kim Gräsman, 2003
It turns out the problem wasn't limited to Amazon, so I built an even trickier add-in; Urlograph. IEAmazUrl is hereby discontinued.
I, for one, make all book references straight to Amazon. I love their service, and how they've indexed every conceivable book on the planet (OK, maybe not every single one, but you get the idea). Their web engine is a bit weird, though. It tacks on all sorts of session and referrer information to the URL, so after surfing around a bit, the URL is often several hundred characters long. Since I post to newsgroups and mailing lists a lot, I wanted a way of automatically stripping off all the junk before posting links. Enter IEAmazUrl.
IEAmazUrl takes the URL in the address bar, detects if it's an Amazon URL, and then strips off all unnecessary data. It also translates the ever-present /exec/obidos/-part into a shorter, undocumented form I ran into on some mailing list.
As an example, searching for "Harry Potter" on Amazon, and clicking up until the book details, yields the following URL: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/043935806X/qid=1058129180/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_1/104-2938446-7739145?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
What many people fail to notice is that http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/043935806X is perfectly equivalent to the hodge-podge above.
Hitting the IEAmazUrl button in IE strips off the unnecessary junk, and places the result on the clipboard. If the URL is not deemed to be "cleanable" it is copied to the clipboard in unmodified form.
Note: IEAmazUrl requires Internet Explorer 5.0 or later to work properly.
2003-07-13
First public release
I'd really like to hear about any bugs or missing features.
IEAmazUrl.exe (56k)