Linking Papers to The Web – Terence Eden’s Blog https://shkspr.mobi/blog Regular nonsense about tech and its effects 🙃 Tue, 22 Oct 2024 12:58:58 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.0 https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/cropped-avatar-32x32.jpeg Linking Papers to The Web – Terence Eden’s Blog https://shkspr.mobi/blog 32 32 <![CDATA[Linking Papers to The Web]]> https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2009/10/linking-papers-to-the-web/ https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2009/10/linking-papers-to-the-web/#comments Thu, 22 Oct 2009 12:19:00 +0000 http://shkspr.mobi/blog/?p=807

Let's Make It Happen

So, assuming each story has a URL, how would that look http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/oct/22/post-national-strike-begins

Turning it into a QR code using my encoder...

The URL in QR form

The URL in QR form

That's probably a bit large for a paper - you could shrink it down or cut down on the error rate, but then it would be hard to scan.

Luckily the Guardian redirects mobile phone browsers to their mobile site - rather than trying to cram the whole page on to a tiny screen - so there only needs to be one code per story.

Assuming that the Guardian's CMS works in a vaugely sensible way, each story has an ID. So the URL could be http://guardian.co.uk/?p=123456789

So, using a shorter URL gives us...

Better?

Better?

If they were to use a custom short-url service - guardi.an for example - the code becomes even smaller.

Could this be printed near every important story?  I see they have links within the paper than you have to manually type in - could this be a way to connect the online and offline versions of the paper?

The Telegraph has a brief piece on why they don't use URLs in their paper.

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