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9m.no – Short URLs for the Unicode Age

9m.no

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Re: 9m.no – Short URLs for the Unicode Age

#51
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter doesn't pay attention to URL length any more. They will force all URLs through t.co even if that makes them longer.

I've found that it doesn't like to shorten certain things, though I haven't quite nailed down what "certain things" are. I tried linking a recent blog post I'd done, which is at least 30 characters (along the lines of http://website/really-neat-post-title ), and when I pasted or typed it into the tweet, it wouldn't autoshorten and would consume those characters. I find myself using goo.gl a distressing amount of time…

The interesting thing about that is that twitter will still generally redirect it.

As an experiment some time ago I grabbed a random sampling of URLs from twitter's limited firehose - and found that on average they spread the user's trail across no fewer than 4 redirects before the final destination was reached. Some as many as 7 or 8.

I've stopped posting URLs to twitter, out of respect for my followers.

Re: 9m.no – Short URLs for the Unicode Age

#52
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All these people had to do was click "about" at the bottom and find this nugget from the author: "Made slightly – but not completely – tounge-in-cheek by @ehamberg."

> tounge-in-cheek “tounge”, typo or some play-on-word I don't understand?

Typo.

Re: 9m.no – Short URLs for the Unicode Age

#55
post #10

I got http://9m.no/𑂜൭ for my daughter's website, but I'm wondering whether this helps shrink character count when used for services like twitter. It's not at all readable, but since it's two (I think) 4-byte unicode characters, will that URL be counted as 13 characters or 21 characters?

Twitter "shrinks" URL's no matter what. My website link is is 11 characters[0], I don't know how shorter it can get. [0] http://bt.hn

For a while, years ago, http://cx worked.

Re: 9m.no – Short URLs for the Unicode Age

#56
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except you need to pick your own UTF-8 character to make it shorter, which is a pain because a lot of them are already taken.

no you don't, it's just a weird interface. Random UTF8 characters like the above example are generated automatically if you enter a url. You _can_ input your own to have something like http://✩.ws/awesometastic

I had to delete the "Type a word here" placeholder text to get it to pick something for me (using Safari). I almost certainly would've given up and assumed it was a required input if you hadn't hinted that it can be made to work.

Re: 9m.no – Short URLs for the Unicode Age

#59
Back when Gruber tried to do something like that in his @daringfireball Twitter feed, it was so incredibly annoying to have the links fail on all my mobile devices that I set up a Python script to convert the links and re-post them under a @darlingfireball account...

He recently posted about that not making sense anymore due to Twitter's URL shortener, but I don't have the link handy offhand.

Re: 9m.no – Short URLs for the Unicode Age

#60
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All these people had to do was click "about" at the bottom and find this nugget from the author: "Made slightly – but not completely – tounge-in-cheek by @ehamberg."

> tounge-in-cheek “tounge”, typo or some play-on-word I don't understand?

That was indeed a typo. Thanks!
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