Look what last.fm has in their robots.txt file:

User-Agent: *
...

Disallow: /harming/humans
Disallow: /ignoring/human/orders
Disallow: /harm/to/self

Allow: /

Oh, who wouldn’t like geek humor

Thanks for pointing this out, jsocol!

As it turns out, Blizzard Entertainment’s game service battle.net has a fail pet!

Well, “fail pet” might be the wrong word for this, but who expected battle.net to have a cutesy kitten on their error pages anyway. Instead, they have a fellow who somewhat looks like the alien cousin of Lennie from “Of Mice and Men”.

“Oops”, indeed!

Update: Deb says, it’s a Murloc. Thanks!

Thanks for the screen shot, clouserw!

The Copy ShortURL Add-on has been on AMO for a week now and was recently approved to be public, so now I have a user base to please

I am inclined to drop the code onto github, where I’d get a proper version history along with a bug tracker. Update: It’s on github now!

For now though, here are a few ideas I have for the add-on, in no particular order and with no promise that I’m about to implement any of this right away:

• Allow other URL shortening services. tinyURL is all fun and games, and I chose it over bit.ly because it does not require an API key — but if you have one at hand, you should be able to use any service you like. Even if only by setting an about:config preference.
• Incorporate selected sites that support short URLs but do not publish them as a header. Zappos (zapp.me), for example. Others seem to have a short URL available (such as: NY Times (nyti.ms), Amazon (amzn.to), ESPN (es.pn)) but only use them on their twitter account and not on every webpage, so there might be nothing we can do .
• When shortening, need to make sure not to use the current URL but the canonical URL if such a header exists. (Fixed!)

Let me know what you think! I’d like to know if any other things come to your minds, or which of the above you’d find especially useful.

Update: The add-on is now on AMO! Check it out! Also, feedback is greatly appreciated!

This week during the Mozilla Summit in Whistler, British Columbia, there was a “Rocket Your Firefox” Jetpack contest: The idea, make a new add-on using the Jetpack SDK, submit it, win a prize.

So I went ahead and made a jetpack called “Copy Short URL” and it does what it sounds like:

On any webpage, you get a new item in the right click menu called “copy short URL”. When you click it, the add-on looks for a canonical short URL exposed in the page header. Currently, a number of major websites expose their own short URLs for any entry on their webpages, among these: youtube (“youtu.be/…”), flickr (“flic.kr/…”), Arstechnica, Techcrunch, and many more.

If, however, the site does not name its own short URL, the add-on automatically falls back to making a short URL using tinyurl.com.

Either way, after a fraction of a second, you end up with a short URL in your clipboard, ready to be used in forum posts, tweets, or wherever else you please.

My add-on won the contest in the “most useful” category. The prize was an awesome jetpack sweatshirt:

If you want to check out the add-on, it is currently available (open source, of course) on the add-ons builder website. I also uploaded the add-on to AMO.

Hope you find it useful!