Saturday, July 6, 2013

The lesson I've learned about URL-shorteners

It goes without saying that when tweeting links, it's a good idea to use URL shorteners, in view of Twitter's 140 character limit.
But if you're ever going to reuse the tweets, you should be very discriminating about which URL-shortening service to use.
I've shortened a lot of links with different URL-shortening services, not concerning myself with the company's pedigree. Big mistake.
A few weeks ago I learned that all of my tux-pla.net links don't work, and just discovered that my is.gd links are often no good either.
So I've been going through the very painstaking work of converting them to goo.gl links (Google's URL-shortening service. I figure if Google goes out of business, then the internet will probably have gone out of business).
I've converted all the tux-pla.net links, but have hundreds and hundreds of is.gd links to go through. Some of the is.gd links work, but most do not, so I have to test each one, and replace the non-working ones.
If you come across one of my is.gd links to a YouTube video which doesn't work, you can try searching for the name and singer in my playlists, find the playlist that has the recording, and go to that video.
And if you ever come to any link that doesn't work, either because the shortened link doesn't work, or because the video has been taken down, deleted, made private, etc.... please tweet me about it so I can update the link.
Thanks






Posted by raybeckerman at 8:51 PM

2 comments:

  1. AppJuly 26, 2013 at 8:10 AM

    Well, it's good that you are using google's shortener for another reason. It's whitelisted by bit.ly, which means whatever you link to won't get automatically flagged as a malware/phishing/scam/spam site, if someone retweets your link and reshortens it with bit.ly, and you will be doing your part to prevent reputation damage by an irresponsible company.

    I went through hell with bit.ly. (see here: http://goo.gl/q6h8Jt )And they really haven't fixed the problem in all this time. They can't do something as simple as not allowing reshortening, like is.gd?

    Note: the original shortener I had used, mentioned in my blog post, has since gone under, probably in no small part by the reputation damage caused by the whole bit.ly fiasco.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. raybeckermanJuly 26, 2013 at 9:56 AM

      Thanks for the info, App. People are always complaining about bit.ly links, which is one of the reasons I stopped using them a long long time ago.

      Delete

I have a few simple comment rules:

(a) No

1. rudeness
2. falsehood
3. deception
4. unfair tactics
5. comment spam
6. shilling or trolling

(b) stay on topic, and

(c) if you're anonymous, use a handle so we can distinguish you from other anonymous commenters.

Thanks for commenting.

Ray

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)