[OT] Google URLs (was Re: popen eating quotes?)

[Christopher Koppler]

On Sun, 3 Aug 2003 17:45:00 -0600, Steven Taschuk
<staschuk at telusplanet.net> wrote:

>Quoth Jeff Epler:
>> http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&threadm=0000161b%40bossar.com.pl&rnum=1&prev=/groups%3Fq%3Dshell%2Bquoting%2Bnt%2Bgroup:comp.lang.python%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26selm%3D0000161b%2540bossar.com.pl%26rnum%3D1%26filter%3D0
>> [apologies for the long URL, I don't know how to get a good memorable
>> URL for a google groups search]
>
>Not memorable, but at least shorter, is
>    <http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=0000161b%40bossar.com.pl>
>In general all you need is the threadm or selm parameter, which
>gives the message-id of the post in question; if memory serves,
>threadm and selm differ in whether the resulting page shows the
>rest of the thread.
>
>(Ignore the selm in your URL above; it's inside the prev
>parameter, which stores information about where you were before
>arriving at the page the URL is actually for.)
>
>It seems that Google also assigns an id to each thread; with
>suitable poking around (see, e.g., the source for the page at the
>above URL) you can locate a 'th' parameter which can be used in
>place of the threadm/selm parameter if you wish to refer to the
>thread as a whole.  In your case that's
>    <http://groups.google.com/groups?th=77576209b6262476>
>(As this illustrates, the resulting URL is often shorter than one
>using the message-id.)  The first ten messages in the thread
>appear on the page obtained thus, with anchors, so you can refer
>to them individually by appending '#link1', '#link2', etc.  This
>makes nice short URLs too (though I'm not certain that *which*
>messages such anchors refer to is constant over time as the thread
>grows).
>
>All discovered empirically.  Use at your own risk.

If all you want is a short URL for posting, have a look at
http://tinyurl.com/

Jeff's *long* URL would then be: http://tinyurl.com/iy1q

--Christopher