From the beginning on this blog, I’m using the long-form of URLs for Amazon referrals. Here’s one for the GoPro Hero3 in HTML:
My brand new
<a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00F3F0GLU/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00F3F0GLU&linkCode=as2&tag=kevideld-20">
GoPro Hero3
</a>
<img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="https://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=kevideld-20&l=as2&o=1&a=B00F3F0GLU" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" width="1"/>
is awesome.Which renders to:
My brand new GoPro Hero3 is awesome.
Now with a Markdown syntax, the code becomes:
My brand new [GoPro Hero3](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00F3F0GLU/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00F3F0GLU&linkCode=as2&tag=kevideld-20)  is awesome.These links are ugly and requires a second URL for the 1-pixel image tracker.
I just discovered that you can use a shorter version of the link. Which make the markup cleaner:
My brand new [GoPro Hero3](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00F3F0GLU/?tag=kevideld-20) is awesome.And here’s how I’ve transformed, in all my Markdown articles, the long Amazon links to their short form.
First, I simply removed all 1-pixel trackers:
1 $ find ./* -iname "*.md" -exec perl -0777 -i -pe "s/\!\[\]\(http:\/\/www\.assoc-amazon\.com.*?\)//gs" "{}" \;
Then I converted all links in one batch with this magic one-liner:
1 $ find ./* -iname "*.md" -exec perl -0777 -i -pe "s/\(http:\/\/www\.amazon\.com\/gp\/product\/(.*?)\/.*?\)/\(http:\/\/www\.amazon\.com\/dp\/\1\/\?tag=kevideld-20\)/gs" "{}" \;
You can even go further (thanks Elias for the tip) and use Amazon’s URL shortener to get the following short links:
My brand new [GoPro Hero3](https://amzn.com/B00F3F0GLU/?tag=kevideld-20) is awesome.This is the sed command I used to convert all links from the previous form to this new scheme:
1 $ find ./* -iname "*.md" -exec perl -0777 -i -pe "s/\(http:\/\/www\.amazon\.com\/dp\/(.*?)\)/\(http:\/\/amzn\.com\/\1\)/gs" "{}" \;