From: Danny Spitzberg <danny@colab.coop>
To: libreplanet-discuss@libreplanet.org
Subject: Re: What's the best URL shortener?
Date: Fri, 23 Mar 2018 11:03:57 +0000 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAEYWcKyORm2dGooYMMP79OTsPPf6CtT-UHZkYJv_50-440VU2A@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <6d28fbd3-b703-8315-b8fd-31146ae78b4e@forestfield.org>
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
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>
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next prev parent reply other threads:[~2018-03-23 12:23 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 15+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2018-03-20 6:12 What's the best URL shortener? Don Saklad
2018-03-20 11:39 ` Steven D. Brewer
2018-03-20 13:09 ` Thomas Harding
2018-03-20 13:48 ` David Hedlund
2018-03-20 12:44 ` Adonay Felipe Nogueira
2018-03-20 13:06 ` Thadeu Lima de Souza Cascardo
2018-03-23 2:00 ` David Paul
2018-03-23 4:58 ` J.B. Nicholson
2018-03-23 11:03 ` Danny Spitzberg [this message]
2018-03-23 11:36 ` Adonay Felipe Nogueira
[not found] <mailman.3.1521561601.29766.libreplanet-discuss@libreplanet.org>
2018-03-20 16:12 ` Tony Chidester
2018-03-20 17:25 ` Adonay Felipe Nogueira
2018-03-21 19:42 ` libreplanet
2018-03-21 22:08 ` Don Saklad
2018-03-21 23:59 ` C.W. Epema
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