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 <j...@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 > _______________________________________________ libreplanet-discuss mailing list libreplanet-discuss@libreplanet.org https://lists.libreplanet.org/mailman/listinfo/libreplanet-discuss