Re: [CR]Attempting to view links that don't work?

(Example: Events:Cirque du Cyclisme)

Date: Wed, 1 Oct 2008 16:21:08 -0400
From: "Dmitry Yaitskov" <dima@rogers.com>
To: Mark Greven <sailormark40@hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: [CR]Attempting to view links that don't work?
In-Reply-To: <BAY136-W2224BEFC501EDC249436CCD4420@phx.gbl>
References:
cc: classicrendezvous@bikelist.org

Hi,

Wednesday, October 1, 2008, 3:51:29 PM, Mark Greven wrote:
> It seems that when attempting to view submitted links on the CR threads,
> that about 30% of them are either not vaild, or simply can't be found. Ar
> e the links being posted in their entirety? I feel that I'm missing some va
> luable knowledge in their absence of function. I'm using the latest version
> of Firefox which works brilliantly everywhere else. Thanks!

Mostly, people copy/paste long links into their mail clients' editors, where they are wrapped at position 80 or thereabouts, producing garbage. Why most modern email editors insist on wrapping URLs is a mystery to me... the solution is to use http://tinyurl.com/ to generate short URLs and post those instead... or use a text editor (such as Notepad) to "re-assemble" all the parts of a garbled URL before pasting it into the browser.

To use a recent example, the link to the Evelyn Hamilton frame looked like this in the original post (2 separate lines):

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item=25029735245 6&ssPageName=STRK:MEWA:IT&ih=015

Clicking on such link, at least in my email reader, tries to open an URL consisting only of the first of the two lines - which of course does not work as the original link was split in two, but copying both lines into a text editor and removing the newline char yields a valid URL:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item=250297352456&ssPageName=STRK:MEWA:IT&ih=015

(The above should be a single line.) Or, you can click on the following "tiny url": http://tinyurl.com/4fg994 with the same result.

Hope this helps...

--
Cheers,
Dmitry Yaitskov,
Toronto, Canada.