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Short links for topics and groups are now available via the tild.es domain
This isn't a very exciting change, and probably won't even be particularly useful until the site is publicly-visible, but I've now set up the https://tild.es domain to handle shortened links to topics and groups.
The short link for each topic is available at the top of its sidebar. For example, this topic's is: https://tild.es/9au
It also supports linking to groups, like https://tild.es/~games (not actually being used anywhere on the site yet)
I'll probably also add support for linking to comments and users eventually (maybe via tild.es/c/ and tild.es/u/ respectively?). Please let me know if you have any other ideas of what might be good to do with it, or if you notice any issues.
I've never really understood the use case for short URLs. What are they for?
Mostly for situations like sending a link through chat/text/twitter/etc., where it's nice to have to have the link be small. The short links are usually less than 1/10 the length of the full one, so they don't take up as much space in the message.
You would be surprised. I use SMS pretty often. I cannot chat with few of my friends who don't have fb (or with my family) another way (I don't count mail as chat platform). And it's much more reliable than internet chat - because people don't need to be connected to the internet to get the message and respond back, so I get faster reply.
Europe, SMS is not dead here.
Speak for yourself. I use SMS all the time - sending and receiving. Most of my friends use SMS quite a lot. It's not used only for social purposes: numerous companies and organisations like to use SMS to send correspondence to me (and, I assume, their other customers). And, since I've started using my personal mobile phone for work... I've even started receiving occasional SMSs from my professional contacts (even though I don't want to). SMS is quite common here in Australia.
I'd be much more likely to remember the title (or some variation thereof) than a semi-random string of letters and numbers. But, I suppose a three-character string is easier to remember.
Are you implying that the use case for short URLs is for humans to remember them? I would have assumed that, if you needed to remember a link, you would save it as a favourite in your browser rather than try to memorise it.
There are cases for needing to remember it. For example, you might be able to save it, but say you need to share it in person for whatever reason. "okay, that's tildes dot net slash tilda dot official slash nine ay you slash short underscore links underscore..."
Or, if you need to open that link on a different system, but you can't use browser synch.
I have never needed to tell someone the URL for a page more specific than www.topleveldomain.com/pagename. Anything more specific than that, and I'll email it to them. But maybe that's just me. Maybe lots of other people recite URLs to their friends. :)
Presentations often include links to forms. It's easier to write down 5 random characters than a long link
Well, I have a lot of tech illiterate family and such, and family who never check their phones or email so it's just easier to do it face to face.
Yes, they're both just numbers that started from 1 and increase every time there's a new one.
Hmm...
... of course I had to test this. :)
https://tild.es/001 doesn't seem to exist. I assume that was a test post that later got deleted.
https://tild.es/002 was the "Welcome to Tildes!" post you made back on 26th April.
Posts 3, 4, 5, 6, were all test posts.
Post number 7 (https://tild.es/007) was "Bronze Radio Return - Build a Stage" by @Amarok in ~music.
Post number 8 (https://tild.es/008) was "How's your week been?" by @greenie in ~talk.
Post number 9 (https://tild.es/009) was another ~music post by Amarok: "Wildlife Control - Analog or Digital".
Post 10 was yet another test post (meaning that 6 out of the first 10 posts were tests).Post number 10 (https://tild.es/a) was a "High-priority things to fix/add" post made by Deimos. (Thanks to @Pat_The_Hat for pointing out the posts are numbers in base 36.)
Post #10 (https://tild.es/a) is not a test post, but post #36 (https://tild.es/10) is. Yay base-36!
Nooooo... you have found my secret ~test topic that I go back and edit to perfect my markdown before posting it in a new topic! Go away! 👋 Shooo 👋 :P
In all fairness... I found your test post. I just didn't display the link for it.
Ahah! I knew you were to blame! ;) (j/k in case that wasn't obvious)
Aren't I always to blame when something goes wrong around here? ;)
D'oh. Of course!
I knew there were letters in the "numbers", but they weren't obviously hexadecimal figures (given the inclusion of letters after "f"), which is the common choice for numbers like this, so I just dismissed them. I didn't click that the numbers were in an even larger base than 16.
One of the high-priority issues is to change comments from just using anchors (
#) to a separate view: https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/issues/256So the fragment-based linking like that wouldn't be workable long-term. I'm actually not sure if you'd even be able to do it at all, because I'm pretty sure that you can't access the
#comment-cidpart from server-side code, which you'd need to be able to do to redirect.Good suggestion with the
@for usernames though, that's a good idea.I'm not sure a landing page / converter is very necessary, if someone has the full link already they could just click on it and copy the short link from there.
There's not really much reason for anyone to visit it anyway unless they type it in manually, but yeah, it probably might as well just redirect to the site.
Love to hear it's being worked on, the current anchor linking is super annoying and it's like the first thing my latest invite has complained about it within minutes of being on the site heh.