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Short URLs: Why and How

sive.rs

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Re: Short URLs: Why and How

#81

Post by dgb23 »

The issue I see with this is that it does not allow for genericity.

URLs on sites with a ton of content often have a regularity to them. For example you might want to have different types of articles, say rooms, people and towels. For each article type you might want different affordances that usually have overlap, like an index, an input form, an activity feed...

URL paths are a good way to encode that kind of regularity.

Of course on a blog of a single person it’s whatever.

Similar: The variants of „Just write HTML!“ posts that come up every once in a while.

Re: Short URLs: Why and How

#82

Post by xcambar »

woojoo666 wrote: post #63
xcambar wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A poor exemple doesn't make for a poor argument. I like hierarchical URLs because they allow me to try and find more content by stripping the end of the URL fo see what is up the hierarchy.

This sounds more like a workaround to a website with poor navigation and UX, but ultimately you are still at the mercy of the website, eg if they have /articles/ links but throw 404 when you try to access /articles directly. It's up to the website to choose how navigation works, and I don't think we should constrain the structure of website urls just to support these hacky workarounds. Now there are other reasons for…

> It's up to the website to choose how navigation works

Yes, and they should live by their choice and implement whatever is implied by their semantics.

URLs also have their own affordances and I expect to be able to act upon them.

Re: Short URLs: Why and How

#83

Post by mdiesel »

Tomte wrote: post #7
blowski wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My name is Dan Blows, and my domain is da.nblo.ws, which I thought was the coolest thing ever. Most people are confused or don’t even notice it.

I used to have a mail address along the lines of d@nblows.com But beware, single letter local parts are not universally supported by web sites. Microsoft accounts with those mail addresses are possible (they used to be impossible), but recently I stumbled upon two other web sites that didn't like single letter local parts.

Haven't had that problem before, far more of a problem when I try to register with site specific email addresses like d+hn@nblows.com which I've tried to get in the habit of doing.

Re: Short URLs: Why and How

#84

Post by moritonal »

corlinpalmer wrote: post #41
Brajeshwar wrote: post #2

I own a 3-letter domain with a 2-letter TLD and still spells my family name. Many of my friends finds it cool when I share links via that domain. The links are indeed easy to remember but it comes at a higher yearly cost of renewal and I had forgotten to renew twice. Luckily, I was able to re-register them (nobody wants it, ;-)). Example https://oin.am/rr/

My name’s Corlin and I own corl.in I sign up for accounts with emails like apple@corl.in and that lets me easily filter and organize my inbox. But when I have to tell some customer service rep my email they get very confused.

Can I ask how you host your emails? I have a similar situation but the price for most hosts for a wild-card domain is prohibitive.

Re: Short URLs: Why and How

#85

Post by blenderdt »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #69
blenderdt wrote: post #18

The "They’re enough" is ofcourse a little silly. Yes there are thousands of combinations if your short url contains any character. But his example is about words and that will leave you with less combinations. But I like the essence of the post.

Exactly. Unless your blog is incredibly broad, you're probably writing about the same subject more than once. What is the author going to do when they write about short urls next time? /su2?

On the other hand: limitations stimulate creativity.

You will get more creative in choosing titles.

Re: Short URLs: Why and How

#86

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

blenderdt wrote: post #85
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Unless your blog is incredibly broad, you're probably writing about the same subject more than once. What is the author going to do when they write about short urls next time? /su2?

On the other hand: limitations stimulate creativity. You will get more creative in choosing titles.

I think I'd prefer it if you were creative with the content of your posts rather than your urls :) I mean, if you think there's no value in the content of the url whatsoever, then just start at /1 and work upwards...

Re: Short URLs: Why and How

#87

Post by hrithwikbha »

Isn't remembering certain short domains hard ?

I was hearing Instagram influencers say "tap the link" all the time

so bought a domain https://tapthe.link which creates a url which can take viewers directly to the app via deep linking instead of a simple redirect,

super helpful for YouTubers and marketers and it's free for creators.

tapthelink is easy to remember than say a short url which says xlps.com or something

Re: Short URLs: Why and How

#88

Post by Tomte »

mdiesel wrote: post #83
Tomte wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to have a mail address along the lines of d@nblows.com But beware, single letter local parts are not universally supported by web sites. Microsoft accounts with those mail addresses are possible (they used to be impossible), but recently I stumbled upon two other web sites that didn't like single letter local parts.

Haven't had that problem before, far more of a problem when I try to register with site specific email addresses like d+hn@nblows.com which I've tried to get in the habit of doing.

Why do people use plus addresses when minus/hyphen addresses are much less problematic?

Are there many providers who support one, but not the other?

Re: Short URLs: Why and How

#89

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

onion2k wrote: post #28
chubot wrote: post #12

PG's website pretty much does this e.g. from 2003: http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html most recent post in 2022: http://www.paulgraham.com/heresy.html I'm not sure I would want to have all my writing in a single directory, but I guess you can't argue with 20 years of longevity ... on both sivers' site and PG's.

You can't determine the file system structure from the URLs. The can map directly, but they don't have to Also... http?

True, but forcing yourself to break that mapping just because you want URLs with less information in them seems like a false economy.

Re: Short URLs: Why and How

#90

Post by ciroduran »

I really appreciate that Blogspot and Wordpress sort of standardized putting the date in the URL, I appreciate being able to spot dates in blog posts at a glance. Yes, your writing may be timeless (hopefully), but to me being able to know when something was written is important most of the time.
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