Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/12/12/link-unshortener.html
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That’s certainly one thing that i’ve never quite liked about URL shortening, is that it doesn’t (by default) give you a way to see where its taking you at a glance. Like i can take a look at a link and see roughly what site its taking me to, but you can’t really do that with the URL shorteners.
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Call me crazy, but if Unshort has to look up the link at the original shortening service, and I create a unique shortened URL for each page served, wouldn’t that still give me full tracking ability and turn Unshort into a tracking trigger, possibly with the added information of who’s using Unshort?
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I think it would show all the traffic coming from the Unshort service instead of the original users. And they could also cache the results, so later users wouldn’t have to go the original site at all.
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One thing I dont get is: when you mouse-over a youtube link like yours, why isn’t there some ability to see the youtube Title? This could be accomplished a number of ways: youtube itself could encode their Share link URLs with the title; the web browser (or add-on) could click-thru the link (ideally with a third-party VPN) and grab the title. But for 15 years, all youtube links have been “blind”.
Regarding this link unshortener, I dont understand how it avoids triggering grabify-type beacons? Do sites like bit.ly have APIs for decoding their links without a click-thru? How do they do it??
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I hope it works with or gets modified to work with google search results. I recently was reminded of how the situation is when I saved a link from a google search and then posted it in a post just to see it wrapped in google engine spaghetti code. I mean, the address is still there inside, but it even has the % sign instead of the actual slashes etc. quite infuriating when links aren’t links no matter who is fucking with them.
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Probably a plot by Rick Astley to protect his primary revenue stream. Dude’s gotta eat.
The commenting software at Plastic .com (RIP) used to show the movie title when hovering over imdb links, and it was an absolute godsend on a site where people would habitually pass references to movies in their comments a little too much. I really wish that kind of thing had’ve caught on further.
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My mnemonic for Rick Rolls: If it ends in XcQ, they’re trolling you.
Though I remember reading somewhere he hasn’t actually made much from the Rick roll meme.
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so, I belong to a facebook group where my niche is to scour libraries and archives, and support others with the appropriate cites.
The problem is that facebook feels compelled to muck about with the url: it adds fbclid to everything. And this breaks things. So-- when I point someone to the exact page of an archive-- my work is undone by facebook’s relentless reformatting.
Are there any fixes?
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a rickroll with an ad eats into the spontaneity.
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