This would not be a problem if websites themselves provided shortened URLs for all paths within their domain name: foo.com/2018/03/31/the-title-of-an-article => foo.com/a3ef33
Google is shutting down its goo.gl URL shortening service
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Re: Google is shutting down its goo.gl URL shortening service
#22I guess I was just a little prescient back in 2011, when I wrote of URL-shortening services in a blog post, "let's not forget that these entities have a nasty tendency to vanish". Not that being prescient about the Big G end-of-lifing services is particularly visionary or difficult, tbh. The post[1] was to publicise a small shortener I'd written for myself (Java/JSP solution) -- in many ways deficient and lacking all…
> it worked well enough for me for a time until I got lazy, got ill, and got rid of the server it was running on. But I was bang on-target about the likelihood of such things disappearing... Oh, the irony...
Kinda the opposite of irony. They said these things disappear. Had they said, "but this one won't," then we would be approaching irony.
Re: Google is shutting down its goo.gl URL shortening service
#23I'm not sure how you guys feel about this, but personally, I've been avoiding Google services for the last couple of years because I just assume they'll eventually get shut down.
Re: Google is shutting down its goo.gl URL shortening service
#24I've recently came across a use case for an URL shortener (Entering long API calls on mobile devices) and was looking for a self-hosted solution. Any recommendations? (No public shortening service, only admins can create new shortcuts.)
the following should cover your requirements:
https://github.com/adfinis-sygroup/node-url-urlshortener
self-hosted and only admin can create new shortcuts.
Hope it helps :)
Re: Google is shutting down its goo.gl URL shortening service
#25"While most features of goo.gl will eventually sunset, all existing links will continue to redirect to the intended destination." https://developers.googleblog.com/2018/03/transitioning-goog...
I hope this doesn't change too. Felt I had to use it to link a humongous wikidata SPARQL query in a (software) research paper recently.
I think in content intented for long term it is always better to use the canonical address, possibly in a footnote if it is too long.
Better yet also include an alternative link to an archive like https://archive.li/ or similar.
Re: Google is shutting down its goo.gl URL shortening service
#26The last time I used an URL shortener was in the old days when Twitter still counted every character of the URL against the 140 char limit. I'm curious what use cases URL shortening services have nowadays?
There are a lot of places where having a compact url is handy. One page I often use them is when putting links in code comments, when I've used a blog post or StackOverflow answer as the basis for some tricky solution to a problem.
Re: Google is shutting down its goo.gl URL shortening service
#27I'm not sure how you guys feel about this, but personally, I've been avoiding Google services for the last couple of years because I just assume they'll eventually get shut down.
Same here. Only thing I'm still strongly dependent on is gmail. I don't really think that's going away anytime soon, but out of principle I'd like to move away from it. Takes a lot of energy unfortunately and you probably need to keep a redirect in place for a long time just in case...
Re: Google is shutting down its goo.gl URL shortening service
#28Archived copy, which works with JS disabled:
Re: Google is shutting down its goo.gl URL shortening service
#29Archived copy, which works with JS disabled: https://archive.is/r53k9#0%
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Re: Google is shutting down its goo.gl URL shortening service
#30I guess I was just a little prescient back in 2011, when I wrote of URL-shortening services in a blog post, "let's not forget that these entities have a nasty tendency to vanish". Not that being prescient about the Big G end-of-lifing services is particularly visionary or difficult, tbh. The post[1] was to publicise a small shortener I'd written for myself (Java/JSP solution) -- in many ways deficient and lacking all…
It has been obvious that they were bad for a while. I called it years before: http://joshua.schachter.org/2009/04/on-url-shorteners
And no, the answer is not running more shorteners. You are just making the problem worse.