My partner may get upset at my slightly preemptive announcement, but we're working on something cool and I just like sharing. :)

We're working on a new system that will help developers and customers out with linking to the Xbox.com Marketplace. The idea is that our site will keep itself up to date using the RSS feed of published games and then all you have to do is use a simple link. So as an example, let's look at my game's URL:

http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/games/media/66acd000-77fe-1000-9115-d802585500ff

Ugly. Now let's look at the short link:

http://xblcg.info/link/Bloc

Much nicer.

The short links support alphanumeric characters and hypens. We strip out any other character. So for Mithra, the link looks like this: http://xblcg.info/link/Mithra-Episode-1-Chapter-1. If you don't know how to convert this yourself, we've made a small tool: http://xblcg.info/GetLink.php. Simply give it the full title of your game and it will do the conversion. The tool does not check our database for the game; it just does the string conversion.

We currently have every game that is available on XBLCG in our database, but the RSS updates is not complete. We plan to manually update it every day until we can get the automatic updates handled. Do note that the URLs may change slightly in the coming days as we finalize the service, so please don't rely on them too heavily just yet.

I'm hoping that this can become a popular service as it's much easier to type and remember than that gigantic marketplace GUID. And with more links out there, creators can hopefully get more sales on their games. :)

EDIT: We now have a full index view of XBLCG on the main page: http://xblcg.info/. You can use that to browse all the games and filter by the first character in the title as well as genre. We're working on more features, so stay tuned.

EDIT 2: We now support referral IDs on the links. See my post here for more details.

EDIT 3: We now support signing in with your LIVE ID and rating games. We added a filter for ratings as well.

You should lose the 'link' in the URL

http://xblcg.info/Bloc is much better IMO

The ZMan:

You should lose the 'link' in the URL

http://xblcg.info/Bloc is much better IMO

We would, but we have plans to expand our service later on to include more functionality. As such we wanted to have the 'link' part in there from the get go so as to not break links later on.

Looks good Nick.  Are you planning on keeping info on referrers, clicks etc every time a link is followed and maybe feeding these back to the developers?

Mark

Nick Gravelyn:

The short links support alphanumeric characters, hyphens, and underscores as a replacement to spaces. We strip out any other character. So for Mithra, the link looks like this: http://xblcg.info/link/Mithra_-_Episode_1_Chapter_1.[/quote.

I would support alphanumberics (in the ASCII sense of alpha) only and replace anything else (after collpasing) with an underscore (or, as I would prefer, with a hypen :)). E.g. http://xblcg.info/link/Mithra_Episode_1_Chapter_1 looks nicer than http://xblcg.info/link/Mithra_-_Episode_1_Chapter_1

MarkMD76:

Looks good Nick.  Are you planning on keeping info on referrers, clicks etc every time a link is followed and maybe feeding these back to the developers?

Collecting stats is something I'm interested in looking into. How to expose those to developers, however, is a tricky thing since I don't want to be giving out stats to the wrong people.

Bjoern Graf:

I would support alphanumberics (in the ASCII sense of alpha) only and replace anything else (after collpasing) with an underscore (or, as I would prefer, with a hypen :)). E.g. http://xblcg.info/link/Mithra_Episode_1_Chapter_1 looks nicer than http://xblcg.info/link/Mithra_-_Episode_1_Chapter_1

I will look into altering the algorithm a little bit. I agree, that does look nicer.

Ok, changes have been made. The URLs now use hyphens instead of underscores and I do agree that it looks nicer. We also strip out the extra characters so the Mithra URL is now this: http://xblcg.info/link/Mithra-Episode-1-Chapter-1. For one word titles, this makes no difference, but it looks nicer for the big titles. As before, the tool can generate the link for you so you don't have to do it.

Nick Gravelyn:

Collecting stats is something I'm interested in looking into. How to expose those to developers, however, is a tricky thing since I don't want to be giving out stats to the wrong people.

I was hoping you'd say that, but like you say, validating the actual developers would be a problem.

Mark

Hey Nick

Are you actually pointing to http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US? That means that it is forcing en-US onto folks.  It works just as well without the en-US and will then pickup the appropriate setting for the user.

Joe

Nope. All the links in our database are free of the en-US part. So it should (hopefully) take you to the proper localized version of that site.

Nick Gravelyn:

Nope. All the links in our database are free of the en-US part. So it should (hopefully) take you to the proper localized version of that site.

I confirmed. It took me to the Japanese marketplace, which responded "there isn't such a content."
This response is no problem since the CG hasn't started here yet.

Nick,

Could this work with the "Tell A Friend" feature I was discussing? Could this short link be added into the text message before it gets approved in peer review? That could be really cool.

Tommy McClain

AzBat360:

Could this work with the "Tell A Friend" feature I was discussing? Could this short link be added into the text message before it gets approved in peer review? That could be really cool.

Sure can. You just use that tool I linked to which will generate the link based on your game title. Then just pop that URL into the game and when it's published, xblcg.info should be updated to include the game.

Thanks Nick! This is an awesome idea and it's extremely generous and helpful for you to have followed through on it.

Just a quick update, I've been working on the index page for a bit and it's pretty solid: http://xblcg.info. Shows a full index of all games and you can narrow them down by starting letter. Full names are shown with the short links being used so you can easily find a game and copy the short link.

Still in the works is getting the developer, genre, and description data from the feeds and being able to display that and filter by genre. Might take a bit for those as the data is a bit harder to get at in the RSS feed, but I'm hoping to have at least some of that in by next weekend.

Nick Gravelyn:

Just a quick update

Looks good Nick.

Mark

Wow, this is really cool!
Thanks for setting something like this up.
These links will be much simpler for people to use and remember.

Wow, this is great!
As an added bonus, I'll be able to fit more links in my sig since the urls are much shorter. ;-)

Okay, I just changed the links in my sig to use your service. Works perfectly!
I have one small suggestion: on the info home page, could you post the correct link next to each game so people can just copy it? That way no one will have to use the converter tool, where you can mistype the name. Or maybe have the converter tool double check to make sure it's a valid link after you've entered it in?

I kind of figured that people could copy the links that are there (just right click, copy link; most browsers support that). We're trying to stick to a clean, minimal theme, but we're going to be expanding it soon, so I'll see if we can find a way to write the URL out without it looking ugly. :)

I'm probably also going to kill the tool at some point since it really isn't all that intuitive or necessary and it's just one extra page to take care of. Right now the recommended route is to go to the index, find the game, and copy the URL

Pretty cool!

I noticed one problem though, no ones made a game starting with 'Y' yet! Wait, wait... lemme think... uh...

'Yacht Screensaver'! I'll take a picture of a yacht, make an app. Not only will you have a 'Y' but I'll make squillions!

Nice work Nick,


Makes it a lot easier and not having to use tinyurl is nice

This is a very good idea!  Those market place links are very long and it is nice to have something specific to XNA.

Devilduck:

Nice work Nick,


Makes it a lot easier and not having to use tinyurl is nice

Zenfar:

This is a very good idea!  Those market place links are very long and it is nice to have something specific to XNA instead of using tinyurl.

You guys should update your signature links. Help spread word of the website and link feature. ;)

Updated... least I could do