Playing With Programmable URLs

One of my weird hobbies is figuring out web tools I can manipulate from just changing something in the URL.

In my just ranted piece on Instagram I sought out a thing that would tell me when in time a certain date was that was like 247 weeks ago.

Research Maniacs had just the thing, as well as gazillion other nifty lookup tools. There is a number information tool, this link tells me everything about the number 13

http://researchmaniacs.com/Numbers/Number-13.html

Do I have to look up via a web form the info for the meaning of 49? Nope, just edit the URL

http://researchmaniacs.com/Numbers/Number-49.html

You might then see the same pattern for their Texting abbbreviation lookup tool:
http://researchmaniacs.com/TextLanguage/Definitions/What-does-LYMY-mean.html

Or Roman Numerals
http://researchmaniacs.com/Numbers/RomanNumerals/What-number-is-MMXV.html

This tells me at some point I could build some Javascript tools that could leverage their URL patterns.

Anyhow, I was curious what the limits of the Weeks Ago tool was.

I started plugging in big numbers, which generates 404 errors.

http://researchmaniacs.com/WhenWas/Weeks/When-Was-1000000-Weeks-Ago.html? Error

http://researchmaniacs.com/WhenWas/Weeks/When-Was-100000-Weeks-Ago.html? Error

http://researchmaniacs.com/WhenWas/Weeks/When-Was-10000-Weeks-Ago.html? Error

http://researchmaniacs.com/WhenWas/Weeks/When-Was-1000-Weeks-Ago.html? This works!

By zeroing in on both sides, I found the limit of the tool is 9999 weeks ago

http://researchmaniacs.com/WhenWas/Weeks/When-Was-9999-Weeks-Ago.html (which today means Monday August 9, 1824).

One might guess a limit of 5 digits? Maybe a database character limit? Who knows?

I find the same limit for days ago…

http://researchmaniacs.com/WhenWas/Days/When-Was-10000-Days-Ago.html? Error

http://researchmaniacs.com/WhenWas/Days/When-Was-9999-Days-Ago.html? Ok

and time…

That’s my hobby.

Top / Featured Image: Screenshot of Research Maniacs web tool for finding the date of a certain time in the past; in this case I found that 10,000 weeks ago was one week beyond it’s limit.