Urlograph v.1.1

Background

I guess some people might call me an obsessive freak, but I honestly can't stand broken URLs. I know about TinyUrl and SnipUrl, but I find that these snipped URLs don't reveal enough (anything, really) about the target of the link.

While not as pervasive as the generic URL shorteners, I've figured out a couple of ways of shortening URLs at the source, rather than hiding them behind a new, opaque URL. First, Amazon drove me crazy, but then I noticed that there are other troublemakers as well. Where IEAmazUrl helped me with Amazon URLs, there was nothing around for MSDN, Google Groups or even Google itself.

Implementation

So, I figured out Urlograph, an Internet Explorer toolbar button that cleans up URLs it knows about and places the result on the clipboard. If you attempt to use it on a URL it doesn't recognize, it will just skip the cleaning and copy the URL un-adorned. See below for a screenshot (url/o icon — new icon submissions welcome!)

Currently, Urlograph knows about the following sites and their filthy URL habits:

Site	Before	After
Amazon	http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0439136350/qid=1086813309/sr=8-2/ref=pd_ka_2/102-5114736-0316958?v=glance&s=books&n=507846	http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0439136350
Google	http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=harry+potter+and+the+prisoner+of+azkaban	http://google.com/search?q=harry+potter+and+the+prisoner+of+azkaban
Google Groups	http://groups.google.com/groups?q=harry+potter+and+the+prisoner+of+azkaban&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&selm=20040605222511.08258.00000506%40mb-m12.aol.com&rnum=6	http://google.com/groups?selm=20040605222511.08258.00000506%40mb-m12.aol.com
MSDN	http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/com/htm/cmf_a2c_63l1.asp	http://msdn.com/library/en-us/com/htm/cmf_a2c_63l1.asp
MS Knowledge Base	http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;236399	http://support.microsoft.com/kb/236399

Note that Urlograph is no panacea — some of these URLs are still pretty long, but I've cut them down as far as possible, including removing hostname prefixes, etc.

For convenience, I also added a keyboard shortcut to execute the clean-and-copy action without the mouse. The default setting is Ctrl+Shift+C, but I have made it configurable through the registry (HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Winwonk\Urlograph). You can remove the keyboard support using the following registry file: KeyboardShortcut.reg, which basically sets the CopyShortcut value to a blank string. The keyboard shortcut parser currently supports Ctrl, Alt, Shift, Esc, Space, A-Z, 0-9, so feel free to experiment.

Installation

Note: Urlograph requires Internet Explorer 5.0 or later to work properly.

Download UrlographInstall.exe
If there are any IE windows open, please close all of them, or you will have to reboot
Run the installer
After installing, open a new instance of Internet Explorer
If the url/o icon is not present on your toolbar, go to View -> Toolbars -> Customize...
Find the url/o icon, with the accompanying text Urlograph - Snip and Copy URL in the list to the left, and double-click it to add it to the toolbar.

Version history

Version 1.1

2005-01-15

Added a cleaner for the MS Knowledge Base (suggested by Ottmar Freudenberger)

Version 1.0

2004-07-04

First public release

Download

Download the setup file below, and start it. It will copy one COM dll to your machine, and register it as a COM add-in for Internet Explorer.

UrlographInstall.exe (53k)

Please report any issues and/or wishes to me.