Zeldman on URL Shortening
August 10, 2009
Jeffrey Zeldman has written an interesting article on URL shortening and, more specifically, how he rolled his own using a plugin for WordPress. He also points to an excellent article written by Joshua Schachter, describing the benefits and pitfalls of link shortening utilities. Both articles are worthy reads. I suggest reading Joshua’s article before Jeffrey’s.
Do you use URL shortening services? I mainly use bit.ly at Twitter, mostly because that’s what everyone else seemed to use. Have you found some services to be better than others?
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Not sure if you know this, but Twitter will automatically shorten long links (more than 20 characters I think). You don’t have to go to bit.ly and shorten it yourself.
Other than Twitter, I don’t see any reason why they are necessary, except in the odd case that you are giving the URL over the phone, or writing it on paper or something.
I didn’t know you could paste the full link in Twitter. I’ve always gone to bit.ly and done it manually. Huzzah for shortcuts!