https://dvd.qa/horse checking in!
Oh wow. But... why? :D
Short URLs: Why and How
121–130 of 172 posts
Re: Short URLs: Why and How
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)
I think you're missing that the feature we're talking about is specifically within the $5/month option, in much the same way that ProtonMail (the one I use), also hides their catch-all option behind a higher price-point.
I'm also fairly sure that they don't let you reply as the address the catch-all was placed on, which is an important feature.
If you know any that do, that'd be great.
Re: Short URLs: Why and How
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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)
I think you're missing that the feature we're talking about is specifically within the $5/month option, in much the same way that ProtonMail (the one I use), also hides their catch-all option behind a higher price-point. I'm also fairly sure that they don't let you reply as the address the catch-all was placed on, which is an important feature. If you know any that do, that'd be great.
True, I missed that "custom domain" isn't part of the lowest tier.
The point still stands though, if you have a mail provider that supports custom domains there usually isn't a limit on the catch all aliases you can add (or a very high one). In any case it's far from being "prohibitively" expensive.
> I'm also fairly sure that they don't let you reply as the address the catch-all was placed on
That is definitely possible with Fastmail as that's how I use it. In their case I believe that feature is called "Alias". If you reply to an email you just select with alias you want to reply from.
Re: Short URLs: Why and How
#124I 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/…
agree, I often edit url directly in the browser
Re: Short URLs: Why and How
#125How 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.
QR codes benefit from shorter URLs too!
Re: Short URLs: Why and How
#126If those hierarchical directories actually work, i.e. http://example.com/blog/2022/05 actually lists blog entries written in May 2022, I'd certainly prefer that to this type of "optimization".
They do on my site :) (assuming there is at least one post in that period, otherwise 404)
Re: Short URLs: Why and How
#127I have found one truly valuable use case for shorter URLs: when a link is included in a printed document. The problem is that every URL shortener replaces the domain, which is IMO a highly dangerous thing.
Re: Short URLs: Why and How
#128URLs generally do not matter to people.
Quick, what’s the URL of this discussion? Will you remember it? Does that have any impact on your usage of HN?
The vast, vast majority of website sessions start with a click. When people bother to type things in, they type them into search bars (reminder that in most browsers, the “address bar” is also the search bar).
So be clear what you want from your URL structure. If you want search traffic, you’d do better to organize it for Google (hierarchical topic-based) than making it short.
If you want to be able to say it or print it for easy typing, a domain name is going to be best. Catch it and redirect it to the target page.
Even “domain.com/word” is going to be hard for most people to remember. If they remember it at all, they will probably type in “domain word” and let Google figure it out for them.
Re: Short URLs: Why and How
#129I 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.
It would love to see something like a "short" link tag. For example imagine that YouTube provided the following tag on video pages
That being said I like when the URL is readable. The YouTube example works because everyone knows that YouTube is a video. Presumably for non-video links they could use something like /user/foobar to differentiate from their "main product". But for blog posts I would much rather see something like /short-urls rather than /su as the reader gets nothing from the first one.
Re: Short URLs: Why and How
#130The "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?
I don't see any problem with /su2. Or /su3.