[00:13] <ersi> affiliate link?
[02:49] <soultcer> ersi: Tinyurl turns links to amazon, ticketmaster, etc. into affiliate links. Apparently the owner of tinyurl is making quite a lot of money doing this. I found a way to find the original, non-affiliate URL
[02:50] <soultcer> But somehow that way doesn't always work if there are special chars in the URL, so I rather use the affiliate link instead of having no URL at all
[03:01] <chronomex> hmmm I wonder how much money he makes that way
[03:13] <soultcer> There's an old article about tinyurl where it says he earned enough during 1.5 years to buy his own house
[03:14] <chronomex> not bad
[03:14] <soultcer> Hey at least it's more useful than that million pixel website
[03:18] <soultcer> It's just, each time I think "finally my scraper can parse every single type of tinyurl response", there is a new way for tinyurl.com to screw me over
[03:27] <chronomex> hahaha
[03:30] <soultcer> Bit.ly is still the most efficient to scrape, because you only ever need HEAD requests, but there are some traps and they recently changed their software so that all hostnames are suddenly lowercase and idna-encoded
[11:42] <ersi> soultcer: Oh, wow. That's.. clever