What's the best URL shortener?

What's the best URL shortener?

[Don Saklad]

What's the best URL shortener?

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Re: What's the best URL shortener?

[Steven D. Brewer]

On 3/20/18 2:12 AM, Don Saklad wrote:
> What's the best URL shortener?

Buy a short domain name and write short URLs? ^_^

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Re: What's the best URL shortener?

[Adonay Felipe Nogueira]

I go for the same recommendation that some gave: buy a short domain and
run a simple webserver that is responsible for shortening URLs.

One can, of course, rely on some third-party to do this, but I found out
that most common URL shorteners *do more nasty stuff* --- such as
requiring you to automatically run non-free software using JavaScript in
your web browser --- than just shortening the addresses. Even so,
suppose a given service is found by you to be "good", it doesn't mean it
will be "good" in the future. I remember back in 2005 when some good URL
shorteners decided to misuse their popularity.

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Re: What's the best URL shortener?

[Thadeu Lima de Souza Cascardo]

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On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 09:44:30AM -0300, Adonay Felipe Nogueira wrote:
> I go for the same recommendation that some gave: buy a short domain and
> run a simple webserver that is responsible for shortening URLs.
> 
> One can, of course, rely on some third-party to do this, but I found out
> that most common URL shorteners *do more nasty stuff* --- such as
> requiring you to automatically run non-free software using JavaScript in
> your web browser --- than just shortening the addresses. Even so,
> suppose a given service is found by you to be "good", it doesn't mean it
> will be "good" in the future. I remember back in 2005 when some good URL
> shorteners decided to misuse their popularity.

I am still clueless as to why the need to use an URL shortener at all.
They are either "digital", which means people should be able to just
click them; or they are on paper and people need to write them down or
remember them, to which I say: use a rememberable URL, not a short one
that people won't remember. Compare example.com/tuesday_meetings to
yy.zz/A1G8P9.

Cascardo.

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Re: What's the best URL shortener?

[Thomas Harding]

Le 20 mars 2018 12:39:44 GMT+01:00, "Steven D. Brewer" <sbrewer@bio.umass.edu> a écrit :
>On 3/20/18 2:12 AM, Don Saklad wrote:
>> What's the best URL shortener?
>
>Buy a short domain name and write short URLs
<grind>

An RRDB with an eight bytes key + a small front-end to generate an HTTP redirect header. 

While I don't understand why people wants anyone can't  remain what they wants to refer more than one day (...)


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Re: What's the best URL shortener?

[David Hedlund]

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.html



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Re: What's the best URL shortener?

[Tony Chidester]

On Tue, 20 Mar 2018 12:00:01 -0400, libreplanet-discuss-request@libreplanet.org wrote:
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Message: 1
> Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2018 02:12:48 -0400
> From: Don Saklad <dsaklad@gnu.org>
> To: libreplanet-discuss@libreplanet.org
> Subject: [libreplanet-discuss] What's the best URL shortener?
> Message-ID: <5i1sgfw9zz.fsf@fencepost.gnu.org>
> Content-Type: text/plain
> 
> What's the best URL shortener?

http://tx0.org 

Pros to using tx0.org from their privacy page:

We do not monetize our access logs
We do not sell advertising or mine data
We do not do doing anything other than shorten URLs
We are brought to you by SDF.ORG, established 1987

SDF has a long history of preserving a non-commercial space on the internet going on thirty years. Plus you don't have to buy a domain name or maintain a server somewhere just for a hyperlink.

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Re: What's the best URL shortener?

[Adonay Felipe Nogueira]

> internet going on thirty years. Plus you don't have to buy a domain

Indeed yu are right, some domains or subdomains are gratis. For this
trivial thing, a dynamic subdomain from freedns.afraid.org or any other,
and a simple webserver which answers simply with HTTP Redirect code and
"Location" HTTP header field should be enough.

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Re: What's the best URL shortener?

[libreplanet]

On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 11:12:56AM -0500, Tony Chidester wrote:
> On Tue, 20 Mar 2018 12:00:01 -0400, libreplanet-discuss-request@libreplanet.org wrote:

> http://tx0.org 
> 
> Pros to using tx0.org from their privacy page:
> 
> We do not monetize our access logs
> We do not sell advertising or mine data
> We do not do doing anything other than shorten URLs
> We are brought to you by SDF.ORG, established 1987
> 
> SDF has a long history of preserving a non-commercial space on the internet going on thirty years. Plus you don't have to buy a domain name or maintain a server somewhere just for a hyperlink.

Similarly, the approach taken by ur1.ca was pretty good.

It seems to have been available as recently as last month:

https://web.archive.org/web/20180228144932/http://ur1.ca/

but my connection attempts to it are timing out now.


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Re: What's the best URL shortener?

[Don Saklad]

Question
How do you find the actual direct link?... specific to the
Double page spread photo/caption

Click on... double page format 4th icon from the top left at
http://tx0.org/pg
https://books.google.com/books?id=z00EAAAAMBAJ&dq=new+breed+1962&q=i+hate+a+lazy+approach

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Re: What's the best URL shortener?

[C.W. Epema]

If you are interested in a real free and open-source shortlink project, you are very welcome to clone my repository from Github: 
git@github.com:kzpm/shortlink.git

The program (SaaS) has been working quite well on my Nginx webserver for over three years now.

The service is extremely convenient for organisations who like to track popularity of certain online services.

Kind regards,

Kees Epema

On Wed, 21 Mar 2018 19:42:55 +0000
libreplanet@etrumeus.com wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 11:12:56AM -0500, Tony Chidester wrote:
> > On Tue, 20 Mar 2018 12:00:01 -0400, libreplanet-discuss-request@libreplanet.org wrote:
> 
> > http://tx0.org 
> > 
> > Pros to using tx0.org from their privacy page:
> > 
> > We do not monetize our access logs
> > We do not sell advertising or mine data
> > We do not do doing anything other than shorten URLs
> > We are brought to you by SDF.ORG, established 1987
> > 
> > SDF has a long history of preserving a non-commercial space on the internet going on thirty years. Plus you don't have to buy a domain name or maintain a server somewhere just for a hyperlink.
> 
> Similarly, the approach taken by ur1.ca was pretty good.
> 
> It seems to have been available as recently as last month:
> 
> https://web.archive.org/web/20180228144932/http://ur1.ca/
> 
> but my connection attempts to it are timing out now.
> 
> 
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> libreplanet-discuss mailing list
> libreplanet-discuss@libreplanet.org
> https://lists.libreplanet.org/mailman/listinfo/libreplanet-discuss


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Re: What's the best URL shortener?

[David Paul]

On 3/20/18, Don Saklad <dsaklad@gnu.org> wrote:
> What's the best URL shortener?

Better question: Should you use a URL shortener at all?

Answer: No. URL shorteners obufuscate the destination of
a link and if the shortening service ever shuts down, all
the shortened URL become dead links to who knows what.

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Re: What's the best URL shortener?

[J.B. Nicholson]

David Paul wrote:
> Better question: Should you use a URL shortener at all?
> 
> Answer: No. URL shorteners obufuscate the destination of
> a link and if the shortening service ever shuts down, all
> the shortened URL become dead links to who knows what.

I agree; the only acceptable exception I can think of is if the short URL 
is a permalink (and the longer URL is not) and the shortening service is 
the same as the service being linked to. But this is not common.

For example, there are wikis which have two URLs for each page--one URL 
based on the page title (which changes with the page title thus rendering 
this URL impermanent) and a short URL which points to the same page 
regardless of changes to the page (a permanent link to this page). The wiki 
generates and maintains the table of short URLs; no third-party service is 
involved. Therefore if one of these short URLs becomes useless the page it 
pointed to was deleted, or the wiki is not available at that URL. Either 
way, what visitors tried to get to is unavailable to all.

I don't find tracking visits to be a valid reason for using a short URL. 
I'm more likely to try and defeat such tracking by posting the ultimate 
destination URL in an attempt to get people to skip the redirectors and 
deny them the tracking traffic.

So use the long URL, let the word wrap fail, and live with a line of text 
that doesn't wrap neatly. It's not a big deal. In hypertext it's simply not 
a problem at all and CSS can probably style long URLs to only show a 
portion of the URL in cases where one can only post a URL to make a link.

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Re: What's the best URL shortener?

[Danny Spitzberg]

WordPress has a nifty url shorter for pages or assets on the same site. It
made a really big difference for lots of people in terms of accessibility,
for example, in printing promotional postcards with xyz.site/jan20event/
On Fri, Mar 23, 2018 at 12:58 AM J.B. Nicholson <jbn@forestfield.org> wrote:

> David Paul wrote:
> > Better question: Should you use a URL shortener at all?
> >
> > Answer: No. URL shorteners obufuscate the destination of
> > a link and if the shortening service ever shuts down, all
> > the shortened URL become dead links to who knows what.
>
> I agree; the only acceptable exception I can think of is if the short URL
> is a permalink (and the longer URL is not) and the shortening service is
> the same as the service being linked to. But this is not common.
>
> For example, there are wikis which have two URLs for each page--one URL
> based on the page title (which changes with the page title thus rendering
> this URL impermanent) and a short URL which points to the same page
> regardless of changes to the page (a permanent link to this page). The wiki
> generates and maintains the table of short URLs; no third-party service is
> involved. Therefore if one of these short URLs becomes useless the page it
> pointed to was deleted, or the wiki is not available at that URL. Either
> way, what visitors tried to get to is unavailable to all.
>
> I don't find tracking visits to be a valid reason for using a short URL.
> I'm more likely to try and defeat such tracking by posting the ultimate
> destination URL in an attempt to get people to skip the redirectors and
> deny them the tracking traffic.
>
> So use the long URL, let the word wrap fail, and live with a line of text
> that doesn't wrap neatly. It's not a big deal. In hypertext it's simply not
> a problem at all and CSS can probably style long URLs to only show a
> portion of the URL in cases where one can only post a URL to make a link.
>
> _______________________________________________
> libreplanet-discuss mailing list
> libreplanet-discuss@libreplanet.org
> https://lists.libreplanet.org/mailman/listinfo/libreplanet-discuss
>
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Re: What's the best URL shortener?

[Adonay Felipe Nogueira]

> Answer: No. URL shorteners obufuscate the destination of
> a link and if the shortening service ever shuts down, all
> the shortened URL become dead links to who knows what.

Nice one! I agree. :D

I do also agree with the idea that the URL shortener should be the same
website of the provider of the original link.

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