Monday, September 25, 2006

Administrivia: Tinyurl in the "Read more..." links

[geeky trivia not of interest to most of you] Read more...The very astute (or obsessively detail-oriented) might notice a "tiny" change in the blog, specifically in the "Read more..." links that appear in some of the longer entries. In the past, the "Read more" link has pointed back to the URL for the full post; the problem is, since there is already a link to the full post at the bottom of the entry, Technorati's indexing algorithm was seeing double and got confused, causing my posts not to show up under the tags shown at the bottom. The solution was to use a format for the "Read more" link that will not confuse Technorati; I chose to use TinyURL, which is a redirection service.

TinyURL is especially useful for very long URLs (web addresses) that you want to send out in an e-mail; for example, you might go to a map site to give directions to an event. Rather than asking people to type in a convoluted string with all sorts of encoded information about the location, or to start from scratch, or even to hope that their e-mail program didn't mangle your URL, you can simply use TinyURL. For example, this very post can be accessed as http://tinyurl.com/g8yka. There are a couple of other similar services, but I'm partial to TinyURL, which operates without ads, and takes you immediately to the desired web page.


For any of you not concerned with such picayune details, just be assured that nothing nefarious is going on with those strange links.

Technorati tags: , TinyURL