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Short URLs: Why and How

sive.rs

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Re: Short URLs: Why and How

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Downvote all you want and enjoy your craft URLs, may they all be safe for aol of you.

The downvotes are because sive.rs is not a URL shortner. It's the blog this post (both the one you're quoting, and the link within) is written on. It's advocating for shorter permalinks.

No post body was provided.

Re: Short URLs: Why and How

#92
post #88
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Some mail providers (eg Gmail) use the plus sign as a label. So your everything still gets routed to d@nblows.com but tagged "hn" or "twitter" or whatever.

It's quite a convenient way to have site specific addresses while still only having a single mailbox to manage.

Re: Short URLs: Why and How

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

Almost every email host that supports custom domains supports receiving email with unlimited wild-cards. Is there something I'm missing?

Example: https://www.fastmail.com/pricing/ ($3/month)

Re: Short URLs: Why and How

#94

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/

Sadly http://merl.in has been idle for the past 10+ years, and I have not been able to get in touch with the owners...

Re: Short URLs: Why and How

#95
post #39
post #23

How many people type the whole URL and how many access it over Google, QR code, or from other site? This is good if content is unique. I find URLs with dates useful when I want to quickly assess how fresh is the content.

I often find articles that don't have the date at all, and the information turns out to be really out of date. Is hiding the date some kind of SEO trend?

> I often find articles that don't have the date at all

At the same time I also always find articles that have an "Updated at" timestamp of a few days ago, I guess that's somehow done automatically to gain some recency points for SEO, not sure if that or removing the timestamp is more annoying.

Re: Short URLs: Why and How

#96

I would love some sort of standard for "short" URLs that are primarily designed for sharing. This would serve as an alternative to the current – usually hierarchial – URLs that are primarily designed around SEO.

The bas thing with existing third-party URL shorteners is that they might (and do) go out of business at any time! I'm not sure whether we need a standard for it, but it might be a good idea to be indendent of such external services.

A simple, generic way could be a hash of the original URL with a compact representation:

    http://example.com/some/path/to/stuff?filter1=asdf&filter2=90#positionX
    http://example.com/s/Wq_2
/s stands for "short" and the ID is the hash representation. If you use a-zA-Z0-9 plus some URL safe characters like _ it should be reasonably short even for large sites. The CMS or whatever software doesn't have to to implement something, because it is mostly just a generic URL shortener running on the same host.

Re: Short URLs: Why and How

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I do something similar with the old Gmail for Domains product (or whatever it was called before Workspace) - it lets me add real mailboxes but also have a catch-all, where everything else gets delivered to a specific address.

I know this is not available any more so I've done the same with Cloudflare Email Routing which lets you set up a catch-all and is (still) free.

Re: Short URLs: Why and How

#99
post #31

I don't like this at all - there is value in a hierarchical naming structure - even if it doesn't represent actual directories . A simple example is: https://www.kozubik.com/ ... where you can find "items": https://www.kozubik.com/items/ ... and one thing inside of "items" is an article on NDS emitters: https://www.kozubik.com/items/nds/ ... which contains supporting multimedia objects: https://www.kozubik.com/items/…

I love that on mobile they all show up as "https://www.kozubik.com/it.."

You can't win, haha

I think I prefer a middleground. I like Sivers' short URLs but I'd go with a word rather than just letters. Letters seems like a step too far for my preferences, looks untidy.

In real reality I'd probably use both methods. Long SEO-delicious URL for the actual article, short redirect to it, best of both worlds. Use whichever is appropriate for the medium (preferring to link online to the non-redirect for less future hassle)

Re: Short URLs: Why and How

#100
post #39
post #23

How many people type the whole URL and how many access it over Google, QR code, or from other site? This is good if content is unique. I find URLs with dates useful when I want to quickly assess how fresh is the content.

I often find articles that don't have the date at all, and the information turns out to be really out of date. Is hiding the date some kind of SEO trend?

> I often find articles that don't have the date at all

I hate this trend, one theory I heard was that it helps the content appear "ever-green".

Another theory is that it helps hide inactivity of content updates; like 100s of articles will be produced in a short span of time and then nothing for months or even years.

But yes, I hate it.

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