The user experience on mobile with multiple url-shortener redirects is beyond annoying. Every new HTTP connection opened on over a marginal cell or wifi connection can stall or fail, even when the actual destination site is up and reachable.
The URL shortener situation is out of control
21–30 of 79 posts
Re: The URL shortener situation is out of control
#22I couldn't find anything that would output something similar to the redirects image shown in this post, so wrote a small script in node to do that. It looks like this: http://cl.ly/image/3T3e462G1C3d
Here's the script: https://gist.github.com/akenn/7ca7e99a51c3a4abc049
Speaking of, what software did this guy use? Is there a bash script that's better than what I wrote?
Re: The URL shortener situation is out of control
#23I think the most practical solution to this, requiring only a change in practice and not in standard, would be for link shorteners to start doing HEAD requests on the urls they shorten and unwrap it to make their shortened link canonically correct if it results in a permanent redirect.
Yeah, there are things that might have some problems with this, but they're things that are probably somewhat abusive to the 301 status code to begin with.
Re: The URL shortener situation is out of control
#24I couldn't find anything that would output something similar to the redirects image shown in this post, so wrote a small script in node to do that. It looks like this: http://cl.ly/image/3T3e462G1C3d Here's the script: https://gist.github.com/akenn/7ca7e99a51c3a4abc049 Speaking of, what software did this guy use? Is there a bash script that's better than what I wrote?
You can just use Chrome's network tab and check the option to persist when navigating.
Re: The URL shortener situation is out of control
#25Is the ridiculously long ThisURLShortenerSituationIsOfficiallyOutOfControl.aspx url part of the rant against short urls?
Re: The URL shortener situation is out of control
#26Closely related, e.g. Photobucket: http://imgur.com/xlWAUdF
Re: The URL shortener situation is out of control
#27Pretty sure I called this one a few years ago. http://joshua.schachter.org/2009/04/on-url-shorteners
Yup! I remember that post. Still holds true
Re: The URL shortener situation is out of control
#28This is propagated by people not really understanding URLs and blindly reposting links that have already been wrapped in a URL shortener through services that wrap them in another one. Whenever I repost links, I repost only the URL of the final page, stripping off anything unnecessary. Sadly, the trend of browsers hiding URLs or pieces of them is not helping the situation either. I don't think this can be solved tech…
I always figured trib.al and bit.ly and their ilk offered different analytics or whatever and that that's why some URLs would bounce through both. I see this especially in major journalism outlets.
Re: The URL shortener situation is out of control
#29> Every redirect is a one more point of failure, one more domain that can rot, one more server that can go down, one more layer between me and the content. These are all good reasons, but are there any real users who are actually being affected by these issues? If it is just a theoretical concern, then I don't think it is reasonable to call the situation "officially out of control".
By far, Twitter's t.co is most often the dead hop. So, for Twitter users it is indeed an effect of the practice.
Re: The URL shortener situation is out of control
#30Is the ridiculously long ThisURLShortenerSituationIsOfficiallyOutOfControl.aspx url part of the rant against short urls?
I'm no SEO guru, but isn't the recommended behavior to create a URL that matches the title of the blog post? I've seen these "post title" URLs with increasing frequency over the past few years.