The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Saturday, April 26, 2014

An unexpected feature

As I was writing the link to RFC-2045 in the previous post, an idea suddenly struck me—why should I have to type out the entire URL? I already have a shortcut to link to Amazon (all I have to do is write a link like <a href="asin:B00BWQW73E"> and mod_blog converts it to <a class="book" href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00BWQW73E/conmanlaborat-20">) so it shouldn't be that hard to add.

I was fully expecting it to take maybe fifteen minutes or so to add the code, but to my surprise, no code change was required! The configuration file has this bit:

affiliate =
{
  {
    proto = "asin",
    link  = "http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/%s/conmanlaborat-20"
  }
}

It was originally intended for affiliate links, but it'll work for this as well. A slight modification:

affiliate =
{
  {
    proto = "asin",
    link  = "http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/%s/conmanlaborat-20"
  },
  {
    proto = "rfc",
    link  = "http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc%s.txt"
  },
}

Now all I have to do is write <a href="rfc:2045"> and mod_blog will convert it to <a href="http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2045.txt">. I love it when stuff like this happens.

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