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URL Shortening

Viewing 12 replies - 1 through 12 (of 12 total)

  • gpo1
    Participant

    @gpo1

    14 years, 8 months ago

    What for?


    stwc
    Participant

    @stwc

    14 years, 8 months ago

    URL shortening is a cancer on the web, and I wish people would just stop it already.

    Using them obfuscates destinations, provides cover for malicious linking, and when the companies that provide these ‘services’ eventually wither up and blow away, every single link made using them rots, and pieces of the internet break.

    Thanks to the idiotic success of Twitter and its artificial 140 character limit, we have to put up with a profusion of this stuff.

    Yeah, I know, I sound like a ranting lunatic about his particular hobbyhorse of mine, but goddamnit, people are breaking one of the fundamental building blocks of the web — that the U in URL means ‘universal’ — because some freakishly popular glorified chat site has somehow captured everyone’s imagination for the last 5 minutes.

    Now get off my lawn!


    mlovelock
    Participant

    @mlovelock

    14 years, 8 months ago

    @stwc Lunatic ;-)

    My favourite url shortener name so far I think is ‘Beam.to’

    We push blog posts out to twitter via Hootsuite, which has its own url shortening ow.ly (see what they did there?) So if you’re looking to do that kind of thing, a separate twitter / sn client might be the way to go.

    If you want to push members blog posts out to twitter, then any compatible WP plugin should work, you would just need to install a sitewide WordPress > Twitter feed plugin so that members can use it on their own blogs too.

    We use shortening services because it’s the nature of the beast but apart from the worries @stwc mentions above, as a few people point out, the danger of course is that if that url shortening service should cease to be so will all your links! Just a thought…


    arnonel
    Participant

    @arnonel

    14 years, 8 months ago

    @stwc thats why i want to have my own (eg: yoururls) with my own domain

    :)


    Windhamdavid
    Participant

    @windhamdavid

    14 years, 8 months ago

    I’m with @stwc on this one .. get off my lawn. :) “nature of the beast” is b/c folks choose to make it that way. @stwc is right U is for Universal and by following some easy w3c recommendations and guidelines we might make some sense of this internet thing. @arnonel ~ my best advice would be to shorten your own domains in the way that you set up the permalinks options or create .htaccess redirects for the urls for any links you want to shorten the url on ~ if you still insist try Shorty and/or Alex King’s Twitter Tools now supports a shortener …but let me warn you that if you use a plugin and/or shorty and it becomes unsupported then essentially, you’ll have broken links everywhere on the web, which is likely the reason that @stwc called it a cancer since you’ll be polluting the web with dead links. I’ve experience this personally with a site that had over ten years of articles. The owners of the site decided to install a shortener, it became unsupported and essentially they left the web with thousands of dead links in retweets, share-this, facebook links. etc.. with no way for me to clean them up, and as a result they also lost organic search results. As URL shortening services become obsolete (which they will), this is exactly what is going to happen.. cancerous shortened dead urls everywhere.


    Jean-Pierre Michaud
    Participant

    @nexia

    14 years, 8 months ago

    if you need shorter urls, WRITE SHORTER PAGE TITLES….

    +1 on stwc’ rant!


    arnonel
    Participant

    @arnonel

    14 years, 8 months ago

    erm @Nexia that would be one for the buddypress creators, right?

    this just aint pretty: http://spoint.me/groups/usp-journal/forum/topic/usp-journal-faq/#post-39


    stwc
    Participant

    @stwc

    14 years, 8 months ago

    But I’d argue that it is in fact very very pretty — it’s SEMANTIC. By reading the URL, you get an idea of the structure of the site and the nature of the page you’ll end up at. That’s exactly the optimal outcome!

    Something like http://dum.as/Sx93ldlj434 (and equally, something like, say http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-18438_7-10406015-82.html?tag=TOCmoreStories.0) tell you precisely nothing, and that is the height of ugliness.


    danbpfr
    Participant

    @chouf1

    14 years, 8 months ago

    +1000 stwc…

    sorry for this shortened message

    I could be more explicit in french, but this language is not allowed here :-)


    modemlooper
    Moderator

    @modemlooper

    14 years, 8 months ago

    One point your missing about url shorteners is most are used for tracking. Sspeaking of semantics, the url services are now allowing custom urls.


    stwc
    Participant

    @stwc

    14 years, 8 months ago

    Custom URLs which will still disappear when the service providers disappear. ;-)


    mlovelock
    Participant

    @mlovelock

    14 years, 8 months ago

    But there are occasions where a shortened url is desirable and / or necessary. Much as we may not want to be dictated to by sites such as twitter a shortened url can be useful in that context, much as I love the semantics of WP / BP urls.

    So maybe an answer is to provide a shortening service for yourself on your own domain? After all, if your domain goes you’re leaving a whole bunch of dead links anyway! Would this work as a plugin?

    Not that I can propose how to do this at the moment, but here’s wikipedia on url shortening: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL_shortening

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