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