QRZ Website Link Policy Update

[KK1W]

For those looking to fix the Pathfinder lookup with QRZ please follow the instructions below copied from the DXlabs Yahoo Group:

Re: Pathfinder QRZ Stopped Working

>>> AA6YQ comments below

>>>QRZ.com has changed the URL used for free (with advertising) access to
callbook information. I don't know whether this change was intentional or
unintentional, or is permanent or temporary. For now, here's how to get it going
again:

1. to enable DXKeeper to use QRZ.com as a callbook via Pathfinder (free with
advertisements), open Pathfinder's Config window and in the "Online Callbook
URLs panel change the QRZ.com URL to

http://www.qrz.com/db/{TargetCallsign}


2. to updated Pathfinder's button-initiated QRZ search,

2a. depress the CTRL key while clicking the QRZ button to display the
"Pathfinder search" window

2b. in the "Pathfinder search" window, change the URL to

http://www.qrz.com/db/{TargetCallsign}

2c. click the Save... button, and save to the file QRZ.txt in Pathfinder's
Searches folder

If this stops working at some point, please let me know.

Direct access to QRZ.com for data subscribers was not affected by the change and
continues to work correctly.

73,

Dave, AA6YQ

Hope this helps,
Jim, KK1W

[K2DBK]

Looks like I'm going to need to go and edit a bunch of my older blog entries, which used the now deprecated form of http://qrz.com/{callsign}. (Hmm, maybe I should just leave them and see if anyone notices. Probably not.

I certainly agree that this makes lots of sense.

[K7IVC]

I did it and updated my book mark or favorite or whatever you call it and I gotta tell ya people that 'it was so easy even a cave man could do it'. I don't understand it but then again I don't understand a lot of this cyber space stuff but it's done!

[K7IVC]

[MM3YEQ]

At the moment, your "Page Not Found" page returns a 200 OK response, when if it really is a "Not Found" it should be returning 404.

What would be a better way would be to throw a 301 Moved Permanently response, with a redirect. That way, caching proxies and search engines will pick up on the new path and use that in future. This is good for your Google pagerank...

So - I request http://www.qrz.com/2M0YEQ or http://www.qrz.com/details/2M0YEQ or whatever, and get bounced to http://www.qrz.com/db/2M0YEQ instead.

This is the "standard" way to handle big reorganisations of content. Of course, not many people do it properly, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't set a good example ;-)

[9H1LO]

DXMySQL for DXSpider has been updated for this change.

Contact me for details/help.

A new version should also be available shortly.

73's

Stan 9H1LO
www.9h1lo.net

[K6TEP]

Another help would be to put some of the info from the first post in this thread into the site's "404 not found" page.

That way any old deprecated links would get the usual 404 error code, but with human readable text that "if you're looking for a callsign, do this..."

[K7IVC]

I have absolutely no idea what you are talkikng about.

[M3HIM]

Seems other URLs not mentioned in the original post above were also deprecated. I think the 2 below were good candidates for being redirected and wouldn't suffer from the same issues described in the main post:

http://www.qrz.com/database?callsign=K2DSL

http://www.qrz.com/detail/K2DSL

Maybe Fred could add the 2 above examples to his original post for those that don't read all the follow-up posts.

Besides HRD which is now patched, other utilities/programs could have been impacted. I've used what was posted at http://www.kg4zow.us/qrz.shtml to provide a QRZ callsign search from the search box in my browser and that needed to be changed as well.

David - K2DSL

I agree. Given my experience with a few APRS tracking sites yesterday, I believe that these are the most common legacy URLs in use as links, in addition to the www.qrz.com/callsign/{callsign} URL which still appears to work.

I also agree with the "301 Moved Permanently response, with a redirect" suggestion which would aid in the correction of legacy URLs in links from other webservers.

I suspect that QRZ.com is running on a Microsoft Windows server because if it was running on a Linux or Unix server, much of this could have been resolved with a few symbolic links.

[K2DSL]

I suspect that QRZ.com is running on a Microsoft Windows server because if it was running on a Linux or Unix server, much of this could have been resolved with a few symbolic links.

If I use http://web-sniffer.net/?url=www.qrz....type=GET&uak=0 as a reference, QRZ shows the following:

Apache/2.2.13 (Unix) PHP/5.3.0 mod_perl/2.0.4 Perl/v5.10.0