By @edent · signal url · 5 comments · 250 words · read ~486 times.
A few years ago, I idly wondered "Whatever happened to URI Schemes?". Older communications protocols didn't rely on http. You can use mailto:me@example.com to send email, sms:+447700900123 to send a text message, and skype:terence.eden to use Skype. There are dozens of these sorts of protocols. But modern apps seem to prefer making everything an https: […]
Continue reading →By @edent · academia MSc pdf url · 12 comments · 450 words · read ~274 times.
There's a new pre-print paper called Pinpointing the problem: Providing page numbers for citations as a crucial part of open science by Leon Y. Xiao and Nick Ballou. It's a short, easily understandable paper, and well worth a read. I think I disagree with nearly all of its conclusions! The main point, I agree with. […]
Continue reading →By @edent · guardian hyperlinks newspapers url web · 13 comments · 400 words · read ~6,345 times.
The Guardian launched its online adventures back in 1999. At some point, they started using the name "Guardian Unlimited". Hey, the dot com boom made us all do crazy things! As part of that branding, they proudly used the domain GU.com Over time, the branding faded and GU.com became a URL shortening service. Tiny URls […]
Continue reading →By @edent · dns punycode url · 5 comments · 150 words · read ~333 times.
More on my experiments with silly Punycode domain names. http://↑↑↓↓←→←→ba.tk/ Yup, copy and paste that into your browser and it will resolve.
Continue reading →By @edent · bugs facebook security unicode url · 350 words · read ~734 times.
Facebook rewrite URLs with Unicode in the path - this is not best practice and could be dangerous. It is possible to create a URL like http://bit.ly/😀 - the Unicode characters are valid in the path. The URL Encoded representation is : bit.ly/%F0%9F%98%80 Facebook mangles these URLs in such a way that it might be […]
Continue reading →By @edent · bit.ly goo.gl NaBloPoMo privacy statistics url · 1 comment · 200 words · read ~237 times.
I'm not a big fan of URL shortners - bit.ly, t.co, goo.gl, ow.ly, etc - I understand the need for them, but they seem to offer a fairly poor service in terms of privacy and usefulness. Take this recent example from Vodafone. Aside from the obvious downsides (user doesn't know where the link will take […]
Continue reading →By @edent · bit.ly dabr longurlplease twitter url · 7 comments · 500 words · read ~491 times.
I hate shortened URLs with a passion. It makes it hard to see what a link is and whether I've visited it before. If they fail - like tr.im threatened to do - you lose your links with no way to see where they once went. So, hurrah for LongURLPlease - a service which takes […]
Continue reading →