Someday one of these guys is going to switch back to using ftp://. Sure, they'd have to proxy or cache everything (no redirect responses), but hey, it's shorter.
http://to/ World's Shortest URL Shortener
131–140 of 150 posts
Re: http://to/ World's Shortest URL Shortener
#132The entire point of having a domain "name" is to have a human-readable representation of an address. Take the human readable part out of the URL and you're left with useless.
Because: http://milkandcookies.net/2008/07/12/?lang=en_US&cntry=US&source=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fsearch%3Fq%3D123%26lang%3Den-US&geoloc=-45.001,-53.175 is pretty readable and useful!
I'm not sure if you're trying to make a point here but yes, that is pretty readable and useful.
Re: http://to/ World's Shortest URL Shortener
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree with that statement. Even before the rise of microblogging, URL shorteners were helpful in certain situations. Which URL would you rather paste in an email for readability's sake: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&source=s_d&saddr=Oak... or http://tr.im/Gw8B In context, the recipient should have no problem anticipating the URL's end point (i.e., you probably just wrote something like, "here are some directio…
That problem should be solved in the 'reader'. If a url looks long, get your email client to show a small version of it. Get it to show the full URL when you hover over it. Whatever. Just do it in the client. Even on twitter it's a stupid artificial restriction. It would be pretty trivial to show minified links for SMS alerts (Which is a tiny amount of twitter anyway now), and show full URLs for everyone else. Then c…
Sure, since it's definitely easier to change thousands of different email clients, twitter clients, and cellphones in use around the world than it is to write a 10-line web app that wraps a key-value store.
Re: http://to/ World's Shortest URL Shortener
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
URL regexes which were already broken from the beginning...
Indeed. DNS names without dots have been used for decades in intranets.
However what it resolves to depends on you search domain. If I shared http://www on twitter everyone would most likely see a different site. People should really be using http://to. to avoid conflicts with internal servers called 'to'
Re: http://to/ World's Shortest URL Shortener
#135Can someone give me a quick introduction on how this was done?
1- Periods (.) don't do anything after a domain (ie www.weebly.com.), but they are useful for preventing the browsers from redirecting to http://www.to.com/ 2- The real domain we're looking at: "to" -- no "suffix" attached (TLD: top-level domain ) 3- The .to registry added an A-record for the "to" domain, which resolves correctly. [Edit: Looks like .cm does this too: ;; ANSWER SECTION: cm. 86400 IN A 195.24.205.60]
Actually the period at the end is part of the DNS standard, without it, your machine's search path is searched first (e.g. in resolv.conf on Unix/Linux)
So if your ISP is AOL, you might have a search path of aol.com so looking up "to" will first try to.aol.com if that exists it will go there. Putting a "." at the end will let it go straight there.
This isn't normally a problem because it's not like aol is going to set up google.com.aol.com. But really everyone should have periods at the end of domains.
Re: http://to/ World's Shortest URL Shortener
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
The former. It shows the reader not only where I'm sending them, but even gives them an idea of what to expect, not to mention the whole dead links problem that will inevitably occur when these sights finally go down. What I would normally do is something like this " Check out my map here [1] " and at the end put "[1] http...", that way a giant ten page url doesn't interfere with the message, yet I don't have to shor…
I like your footnote idea, though I think it seems fairly unnatural for casual communication. To me, short URLs seem like the more user-friendly solution. I'm also still not sold on the dead link problem for two reasons. 1. You're already relying on one site (in this case Google) not to go down or change its dynamic URL patterns. Certainly adding another layer increases the chances of a dead link, but any time you li…
1. The dead link problem is that Google, for example, can't control whether a bit.ly link will work but they can ensure maps.google.com links will always work if they want to. And they have a bigger incentive to ensure this than bit.ly do (since they consider their Maps service to be an important service).
2. True, but there is a vast amount of valuable information held in tweets (along with the noise), each with a permalink. A tweet's permalink is useless if it contains a shortened URL which no longer works. Do we really want this body of information to become useless at soon as URL-shortener-of-the-week loses funding and turns its servers off?
Re: http://to/ World's Shortest URL Shortener
#137This was my idea originally. I talk to the guy that runs the registrar occasionally (I got burri.to 12 years ago...)
Thank you for this. I now have another example to use when I bitchslap people who don't read domain name RFCs.
Re: http://to/ World's Shortest URL Shortener
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
The stats that you can get out of something like bit.ly are quite useful. Or at least ego-strokingly hypnotic.
I use an extension, like many others, that automatically "follows" every url shortener url on a page. Your stats are likely skewed.
In an ideal world the extension would only be making HEAD requests and the analytics system would only count GETs, right?
Re: http://to/ World's Shortest URL Shortener
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Getting access to sell all .tvs for $4MM/year is a steal, IMHO. Not to mention the manner in which they sold them is unique. With most TLDs, all domains cost the same price, and its first come, first served. With .tv, the domains were priced according to their value, with many costing $25,000 or more per year. So for instance I have no idea what mlb.tv cost Major League Baseball, but it was a lot more than $49/year.…
It was a pretty shrewd move for Tuvalu too - $4m/year is about 30% of their GDP.
That's a really good point. And the government of Tuvalu hasa 20% stake in the company which actually owns the contract (Verisign owns the rest).
Very well structured deal for both sides.
Re: http://to/ World's Shortest URL Shortener
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
The former. Even though it's 355 characters, at least it tells me it's a Google maps link. Which the shortened version doesn't. There are some situations where URL shortening is arguably useful. But there's absolutely no reason why "microblogging" should be one of them.
Spoken like a person without a Twitter account.
You got me ;)