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

[Randy Kramer <rhkramer@gmail.com>]

Camaleón,

Thanks!

I've written to yahoo--if I get a response I'll summarize it here.

Randy Kramer

On Sunday 12 February 2012 05:02:07 am Camaleón wrote:
> 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