More Short URLs for the Copy Short URL Add-on
Since I last blogged about the Copy Short URL add-on, I stumbled across another, very popular example of automatically exposed short URLs:
WordPress.com as well as self-hosted WordPress instances have automatic short URLs now, starting with WordPress version 3.0.
For example, this blog post on wordpress.com about a possible proof for P != NP has the shiny short URL http://wp.me/pr9Ir-1lN.
A recent blog post on my blog, in turn, has: http://fredericiana.com/?p=2921.
Of course, it’s a little sad that the auto-generated short URLs on self-hosted WordPress instances are so ugly, and they are not really short enough to use them easily on twitter or with other character-sensitive applications. But considering how long your average blog post URL is in the first place, it seems like a great win nonetheless.
An unrelated side note: I filed a bug to expose bugzil.la URLs on Mozilla’s bugzilla instance. It’s not picked up or resolved yet, so if you want to see the support as much as I, feel free to comment on or CC yourself on the bug!
http://fredericiana.com/2010/08/13/bit-ly-fail-pufferfish/ is a fantastic URL. It gives me the date and title, it goes where it says it does, you can keep it working for 100 years with an occasional Apache rewrite rule change. By comparison, http://fredericiana.com/?p=2921 is uncacheable useless query-string drivel, like all the other shortened URLs.
Why are we allowing Tim Berners-Lee’s web of persistent meaningful URLs to be ruined thanks to Twitter’s half-assed stupidity in failing to detect link syntax when they count their 140 characters? E.g. Textile’s “this blog post”:http://fredericiana.com/2010/08/13/bit-ly-fail-pufferfish/ syntax would work fine.
Aggh.
You do have a point there. Long(er) URLs tend to be much more meaningful than their short counterparts — except for maybe the bugzil.la/123456 URL, maybe, which happens to communicate all information the long URL has, too.
As long as you forward correctly to the actual URL though, short URLs are just as cacheable as any other. I do, however, not appreciate the ?p= crap in there. Since I already use rewrite rules to make URLs pretty, they might as well have used /p/2921 (same amount of characters) or even /p2921 or /2921 (with an appropriate regex). It seems, they put more thought into the feature on wordpress.com than they did for self-hosted instances.