URL Encoding
Comptrio offers an online URL encoding tool that now offers a selection for an afiliate link ‘hide’ or a more standards compliant version of URL encoding. A fully compliant generator will be available by next week.
This began as an online tool that I created without linking it to my site or creating a webpage for it. Since I have turned it into a webpage on my site it has generated a lot of traffic and I feel the need to create a more responsible version of it. Some of the first steps were made tonight. Only the reserved characters in the query string are encoded when using this tool in compliance mode. The URLs produced are standards compliant. The goal is complete RFC 3986 compliance. This is the most recent web standard on this aspect of web design as of January 2005.
The affiliate link ‘hide’ portion of this online tool encodes all characters in the URL. This is used by people who wish to protect their affiliate links from prying eyes. It is not a 100% solid way to hide a URL as it can be de-coded, but most users won’t even try to crack the code. It is real difficult to read and works on almost every browser you will ever hear of. Try it out and see for yourself! Enter a full URL or a partial.
This started out as a small tool for my use, became a busy webpage, and will end up as a solid tool for the web design and development community to use. I am open to suggestions on this or any tool offered by Comptrio to improve it’s usability.
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EDITORS NOTE
This tool was modified as of 29SEP2005 to work properly. The URLs it generates are 100% standards compliant. It works equally well with URLs that currently use & and adds it to those that need it. Let me know if you find any errors, I’ll be happy to add a few more rules to the engine if you spot any bugs or problems I missed.