Shrinking URLs down

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2005/11/09 15:01 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2005/11/09/490792.aspx

I know people like to talk about things like TinyURL, but I am talking about something different, something I found out the other day when looking at a URL that Raymond Chen had made to a blog post (which they put in an email).

Take for example the link to this post -- it is:

http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2005/11/09/490792.aspx

It turns out that out of all of that the only things that are important are the URI:

http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2005/11/09/490792.aspx

and the final file name of the post:

http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2005/11/09/490792.aspx

So you can actually just use:

http://blogs.msdn.com/490792.aspx

or if you want someone to know whose blog it is you can use:

http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/490792.aspx

You could have a little fun in the middle with no harm done:

http://blogs.msdn.com/thisspaceforrent/490792.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/something-obnoxious/490792.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/this-URL-is-getting-longer-and-longer-all-the-time-and-I-wonder-when-it-will-end/490792.aspx

Hell, you can even play a small game with spoofing that name to make it look like the link is to someone else's blog:

http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/490792.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/jledgard/490792.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/jobsblog/490792.aspx

or you can make someone from the inactive list seem to come alive again. Like saying about how cool it is that Brett is finally posting:

http://blogs.msdn.com/brettsh/490792.aspx

Of course, once you click on it, you are right back where you started.

I guess nothing is foolproof; thankfully, it ends up sending you to the real post rather than just transferring and keeping the old link in Address Bar -- or I would call it a pretty dangerous identity theft style spoofing bug!

I am sure people would get tired of bogus links quickly enough. But it was pretty cool there for a moment....

Right now I imagining how this post will look if they change the behavior in the future. Ah well, to readers of the future who are confused at why I am going on about something that does not work, I swear it did work once!

(Special thanks to Douglas R. Hofstadter and the chapters of Metamagical Themas that talked about self-referential sentences, which helped inspire the next URL)

http://blogs.msdn.com/this-post-refers-to-itself/490792.aspx

:-)

# Rosyna on 9 Nov 2005 3:18 PM:

# Mihai on 9 Nov 2005 10:29 PM:

# Michael S. Kaplan on 10 Nov 2005 2:09 AM:

# Simon on 10 Nov 2005 2:50 AM:

# Mihai on 10 Nov 2005 4:27 AM:

# Michael S. Kaplan on 10 Nov 2005 8:52 AM:

# Michael S. Kaplan on 10 Nov 2005 8:54 AM:

# Mihai on 11 Nov 2005 12:15 PM:

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