Re: [libreplanet-discuss] What's the best URL shortener?

[Danny Spitzberg]

WordPress has a nifty url shorter for pages or assets on the same site. It
made a really big difference for lots of people in terms of accessibility,
for example, in printing promotional postcards with xyz.site/jan20event/
On Fri, Mar 23, 2018 at 12:58 AM J.B. Nicholson <jbn@forestfield.org> wrote:

> David Paul wrote:
> > Better question: Should you use a URL shortener at all?
> >
> > Answer: No. URL shorteners obufuscate the destination of
> > a link and if the shortening service ever shuts down, all
> > the shortened URL become dead links to who knows what.
>
> I agree; the only acceptable exception I can think of is if the short URL
> is a permalink (and the longer URL is not) and the shortening service is
> the same as the service being linked to. But this is not common.
>
> For example, there are wikis which have two URLs for each page--one URL
> based on the page title (which changes with the page title thus rendering
> this URL impermanent) and a short URL which points to the same page
> regardless of changes to the page (a permanent link to this page). The wiki
> generates and maintains the table of short URLs; no third-party service is
> involved. Therefore if one of these short URLs becomes useless the page it
> pointed to was deleted, or the wiki is not available at that URL. Either
> way, what visitors tried to get to is unavailable to all.
>
> I don't find tracking visits to be a valid reason for using a short URL.
> I'm more likely to try and defeat such tracking by posting the ultimate
> destination URL in an attempt to get people to skip the redirectors and
> deny them the tracking traffic.
>
> So use the long URL, let the word wrap fail, and live with a line of text
> that doesn't wrap neatly. It's not a big deal. In hypertext it's simply not
> a problem at all and CSS can probably style long URLs to only show a
> portion of the URL in cases where one can only post a URL to make a link.
>
> _______________________________________________
> libreplanet-discuss mailing list
> libreplanet-discuss@libreplanet.org
> https://lists.libreplanet.org/mailman/listinfo/libreplanet-discuss
>