or, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Fear and Loathing at a Public Library Reference Desk


This Post Is Just Six Words Long

   September 10th, 2009 Brian Herzog

This has nothing to do with anything, but length of the domain name on this postcard made me laugh:

long domain name

It's no fault of theirs, really - just bad luck on the name of their organization. And actually, it's probably more memorable and less confusing that MARILFN.org or MANDRILN.org or any other variant.

And In case you're interested on this Thursday, here are a couple other long-URL related links to enjoy:

And the title?



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In Praise of Short URLs

   April 7th, 2009 Brian Herzog

mass.gov logoThe Mass.gov website has a lot of great information, and being a librarian in Massachusetts, I use it all the time. However, one thing it does very poorly is URLs.

The powers that be at Mass.gov recently launched a new section of the website, devoted to the Massachusetts Recovery and Reinvestment Plan for the state's economy. What's the URL, you ask? This:

http://www.mass.gov/?pageID=gov3agencylanding&L=4&L0=Home&L1=Key+
Priorities&L2=Job+Creation+%26+Economic+Growth&L3=Massachusetts+Recovery+
and+Reinvestment+Plan&sid=Agov3

A recent promotional email introduced the site's resources, and listed the URL. My first thought was, wow, that pretty much guarantees it won't get used. Perhaps it's the Marketing degree in me, but if something doesn't have a catch name, or at least a moderately decipherable one, it automatically has less chance of succeeding.

I'm sure whatever CMS software the state uses is to blame for the ugly URLs, but they certainly have the power to do better. To wit: about a week later, a second email went out saying the new URL for the website was Mass.gov/recovery - perfect.

I use redirects on the library's website, and am glad that the state is too (and I'm sure it took more than my complaint email to do it).

But in addition to local redirects, URL shortening services like tinyURL.com, icanhaz.com and others can also help. Their popularity seems to have shot up with Twitter, but I use them in email instead of having monstrous URLs wrapping to multiple lines and thus not working. There are drawbacks to these services, but now that custom URLs are possible, I feel a little more comfortable using them with patrons.

It'd be great if all domains offered these short URL redirect services, and were limited just to that domain. That way, anyone could turn one of the standard Mass.gov long URL into a nice and clean Mass.gov-based useful URL, while at the same time not redirect a Mass.gov short URL to a porn site. I checked around and didn't see such software, but I'm going to keep looking.



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