On Sat, May 28, 2011 at 4:10 AM, Prasad, Ramit <ramit.pra...@jpmchase.com> wrote: >>>We also, though, need *real* URLs. Blind URLs through obfuscation >>>services have their uses, but surely not in a forum like this. The real >>>URL is <URL:http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2588262>. > > I remember reading a news article where a man was arrested (or was it fired) > for pornography because he clicked a link. I would *REALLY* prefer not to be > 4chan-ed into jail (or fired) because I could not safely tell what a > shortened URL really pointed to. Besides, shortened URLs do not live as long > and are more likely to fail when people search the archives.
I've seen FAR more dead links than dead URL shortening services. It's a lot more likely that the destination will go down than that the tinyurl service will lose its data. If you're worried about where you're going, grab a URL renderer; TinyURL.com has "preview mode" which you can set with a cookie, and for others, all you need is something which takes a URL off the clipboard, requests it, gets the Location: header, and puts that on the clipboard for you. I coded such a facility into my MUD client (RosMud), because shortened URLs are important when lines are limited to 80 characters (less some overhead); it'd be quite easy to build a little Python-GTK or Python-TK app that gives you a nice window and makes it easy. Chris Angelico -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
