[OT] Re: (Fairly) new very long URLs on news.yahoo?

[Camaleón <noelamac@gmail.com>]

On Sat, 11 Feb 2012 16:52:47 -0500, Randy Kramer wrote:

> This is OT.  I tried posting it on
> D-community-offtopic@lists.alioth.debian.org but didn't get much
> response, so I thought I'd try here (especially because I did get some
> good help on the other question I asked recently, about invisible cache
> files on /tmp from Flash).

Maybe because the Yahoo issue is way off-topic even for a chit-chat 
mailing list ;-)

> A number of questions:
> 
> Has anyone else noticed the very long URLs that are used (sometimes) on
> news.yahoo.com?

(...)

Yes, and Google is also doing something similar. Browsing the web is 
getting really annoying.

> My interests include the following:
> 
>    * finding a good address to write to yahoo and complain 

http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/news/forms_index.html

> * finding a way to consistently click on a link and get the page to
> come up with the shorter link
> * and thus, being able to C&P the link to my blog without subsequent
> editing
> * maybe finding a way to modify klipper to automatically truncate
> such links before the first ;

That's up to Yahoo! not us (users). What you can do is finding the short 
like by searching for the news header in Google.

For instance, this is for the given sample:

- Header: Things to Watch For at CPAC

- Google search:
http://www.google.es/search?q=Things+to+Watch+For+at+CPAC&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:es-ES:official&client=firefox-a

- Which points to:
http://news.yahoo.com/things-watch-cpac-094500007.html

> Obviously, I could use a service like tinyurl to create a new smaller
> url, but that is not an acceptable solution to me for a few reasons. 

You can ask Yahoo! if they provide a "permalink" or something like that, at 
least for their news pages. They can even have a policy for external 
linking or specific tools for webmasters/bloggers to automate the job.

> (Among them, the url loses any meaning embedded in the original url, and
> now I have to worry about tinyurl going defunct, at which point the
> smaller urls would not work and have no clue to find the original URL. 

(...)

I neither like URL shortening services.

Greetings,

-- 
Camaleón