{"id":458,"date":"2008-01-08T05:00:00","date_gmt":"2008-01-08T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/2008\/01\/08\/a-tiny-annoyance\/"},"modified":"2008-07-25T21:07:18","modified_gmt":"2008-07-26T05:07:18","slug":"a-tiny-annoyance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/webwork\/a-tiny-annoyance\/","title":{"rendered":"A tiny annoyance"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I sometimes visit a popular literary blog where the posts alternate between rambling discourses and cryptic links. I generally prefer the links, except that the author uses the service known as tinyurl for many of them.<\/p>\n<p>Tinyurl was originally intended as a way of doing things like shortening links in e-mails, since some people can&#8217;t deal with links that run over lines. It has a few other legitmate uses, such as shortening urls for use in print or in presentations. But there is no excuse for using it in this kind of situation.<\/p>\n<p>There are two main reasons not to use tinyurl unless you really have to:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>First, it is fundamentally a bad idea to disguise links from visitors. When you hover your mouse over a tinyurl link it tells you nothing about the destination. It could lead to a site you&#8217;ve already visited, a spam site, or one containing malicious code. Most often, it just results in a waste of time.<br \/>\n(Tinyurl does <a title=\"tinyurl preview\" href=\"http:\/\/tinyurl.com\/preview.php\" target=\"_blank\">offer a preview function<\/a>, but many people don&#8217;t know about it, and it gets into the issue of cookies management.)<\/li>\n<li>Second, tinyurl undermines the basic architecture of the web by funneling links through a single destination, creating a greater likelihood of failure and the potential for abuse.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Maybe on twitter there is a need for these short urls. In general, however, I don&#8217;t know why a webmaster would want to remove meaningful content and replace it with emptiness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I sometimes visit a popular literary blog where the posts alternate between rambling discourses and cryptic links. I generally prefer the links, except that the author uses the&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/458"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=458"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/458\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":717,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/458\/revisions\/717"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}