Hi guys,
Thought I'd pop in and say hello, seeing there's a whole thread about
my (in)DecentURL here. :-) Chuck Esterbrook asked about when
DecentURLs expire and noted there was a thread the service it on this
list.
To try to answer a couple of the queries and concerns:
With DecentURL you can type in your own title, but on top of that it
always inserts the hostname of the ugly URL into the first part of the
"decent address" -- so you know where you're going. You can get around
this by doing a double-redirect via TinyURL or something, but at least
it works for users who aren't trying to abuse it.
I've also just added code so that if you enter an IP address it does a
reverse DNS lookup (thanks, Brad). So now if you try creating a
DecentURL to an IP address, it'll usually come up with something
sensible for the hostname it uses. For example, the logo John pointed
to here becomes:
http://decenturl.com/cw-portal.ucsd/ucsd-logo
In other words, DecentURL is not fool-proof, but I believe it's better
than TinyURL and other such services. :-) Like anything on the net,
you still have to *more or less* trust the sender/source.
About when the links expire. I'm not gonna say "never", because that's
far too big a word, but they don't have an expiry date. So till the
site becomes history. A bit more on that here:
http://decenturl.com/about#expiration
Hope that helps a wee bit. Feel free to send me any further
suggestions/comments here, or to my email: ben [aht] micropledge.com
Cheers!
Ben
--
Ben Hoyt, +64 21 331 841
http://decenturl.com/
--
[email protected]
http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
