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Idea #14: BBC short URLs/URIs

Written by LoopZilla the 1 Jan 09 at 20:06. Related project: Nothing/Others. Status: New
Rationale
bit.ly, snurl, tinyurl are used by the BBC and many others.

What doesn't the BBC have its own short URL service?
Tags: (none)

10
votes
up equal down
Solution #1: Code it
Written by LoopZilla the 1 Jan 09 at 20:06.
Write some software?
-2
votes
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Solution #2: Use an existing API
Written by www.richardsprojects.co.uk the 2 Jan 09 at 18:04.
bit.ly, snurl and tinyURL have APIs to allow you to use their service. You use one of them to allow BBC site users to easily make short URLs of pages.

This should be quicker to implement, but I'm not sure how you'd choose which one to use. Also, in support of solution #1 creating a BBC service would give the short URLS a more official BBC like nature.

Propose your solution


Duplicates


Comments
www.richardsprojects.co.uk wrote on the 2 Jan 09 at 17:54
Would this be limited to BBC pages or would it be used for pages the BBC links to on other sites?

derivadow wrote on the 3 Jan 09 at 09:26
URL shortning serivces are evil, because they break the web and harm your google juice. A much better soultion is to design short urls in the first instance.

I'm not sure I understand why people don't like URLs - they are what makes the web, services that try to replace them (eg DOI) or services that provide another level of indirection and therefore a single point of failure cause fractures in the fabric of the web. Don't do it people!

upyourego wrote on the 6 Jan 09 at 19:26
Short URL services are only of any use on micro-blogging platforms like Twitter, within Facebook updates or when sending Instant Messages.

Other than that you'd be just as well using the full URL.

However it would be interesting for the BBC to offer short url's for some of their news stories and it shouldn't be THAT difficult really - the code to do this isn't exactly ground breaking.

For news you could just use the same code already in place.

So the page could exist at:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7814054.stm

But have an alternative URL at
http://bbc.im/7814054

In fact a link to an iPlayer video could exist at:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00gndt1/

To: http://bbc.im/b00gndt1

Dot IM is the domain for Isle of Man and is already owned by the BBC and not in active use.

I know about the whole google juice thing but to be honest the BBC doesn't really need to worry about Google Juice.

Oh and the short url service I set up is gtfa.eu (get the flip away you).

nico_macdonald wrote on the 7 Jan 09 at 08:40
I agree that where possible the same URL (URI) should be used in all instances, as this facilitates all services which use the URL as the common entity (Delicious, Magnolia, etc, as well as Google search). However, while we have popular systems that constrain post length we need some solution. To rely on a third party is undesirable as if/when it ceases to function the value will be lost. Also, it looks unprofessional to be using a third party service in this area. I have in the past noted that the Today Programme on Radio 4 doesn't use specific URLs for stories (likely for reasons of length), nor even qualify the host name (with http://). Their 'Twitterer' acknowledged the issue, to which my response was 'Thanks for the advice Nico. We are trying to do more tinyURL linking so keep following' and my follow-up was 'Glad TinyURL considered. But BBC should have its own TinyURL service based on PiPs. Can connect you to FM&T people who could help.'

samdutton wrote on the 15 Jan 09 at 14:15
I have no expertise in this area, but we shouldn't have to write the a URL redirection thing from scratch.

There already seems to be stuff out there that does what we want, such as the Catalyst plugin below, suggested by a developer friend of mine, Alex Howarth.

I also agree that tinyURLs are often just annoying and counter-productive -- even when they use meaningful names. For example: I read the Technology Guardian and see interesting links, but generally don't remember them, whereas I might have remembered a domain name (at least).

Simple, short, logical URLs, on the other hand, are a Good Thing.

...........................

Download http://search.cpan.org/~bayside/Catalyst-Plugin-CRUD-0.21/

There's a sample TinyURL Catalyst application that works out of the box.

Decompress the tarball. cd Catalyst-Plugin-CRUD-0.21/sample/TinyURL

make it and then:

./script/tinyurl_server.pl

http://127.0.0.1:3000/tinyurl/create
http://127.0.0.1:3000/tinyurl/list

the ID's in the list are the short urls,. so:

http://127.0.0.1:3000/1

will redirect to the first URL in the list

...

You could obviously replace the auto incremental id with something home brewed to make it a little prettier than /1 /2 /3 /40237 etc

ianforrester (Administrator) wrote on the 26 Jan 09 at 12:55
Would be cool to support the W3C suggested standard - CURIE

http://www.cafeconleche.org/#January_18_2009_39520

Chaz6 wrote on the 2 Sep 09 at 15:38
Still no update? I very much like the idea of using bbc.im for short links.


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