Friendly URL’s at Amazon Nov10 '05

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# (1 of 7): Josh » joahua.com/blog

7 hours, 11 minutes after the fact. (Thu 10 Nov 2005, 5:36 PM CST)

http://tinyurl.com/ is great if you want to share your wishlist or something. Obviously it's not a solution for the WHOLE of Amazon, and they really need to fix that, but for limited application it looks worthwhile.

# (2 of 7): Andy » andyatkinson.net

8 hours, 29 minutes after the fact. (Thu 10 Nov 2005, 6:54 PM CST)

Josh beat me to it, but I actually did it for you:

http://tinyurl.com/dnvhl

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# (3 of 7): Matthom

8 hours, 30 minutes after the fact. (Thu 10 Nov 2005, 6:55 PM CST)

Thanks Josh... I agree TinyURL is helpful. But like you said - for the WHOLE of Amazon - this is not the way to go. After all - we're looking for semantic meaning in the URL - not some other application interpreting it.

So, if I send everyone my Wish List as a link with the words tinyurl.com/... in it - that doesn't explain (to the naked eye) what the hell I'm linking to. After all - what does tinyurl mean to anyone?

Sorry for the slight rant. I'm more talking to myself, in this case.

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# (4 of 7): Josh » joahua.com/blog

9 hours, 21 minutes after the fact. (Thu 10 Nov 2005, 7:46 PM CST)

Yeah I agree. It bugs me not knowing where a URL will take me, which makes me opposed to TinyURL in a way. For things like your wishlist, however, I reckon it's a viable option, even if it's not technically ideal (for a variety of reasons, including dependence upon another provider, non-semantic URIs, extraneous DNS lookups, etc).

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# (5 of 7): Matthom

9 hours, 25 minutes after the fact. (Thu 10 Nov 2005, 7:50 PM CST)

Thanks Andy - yeah, works fine. I have to admit it's pretty nifty.

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# (6 of 7): Andy » paininthetech.com

1 day, 7 hours after the fact. (Fri 11 Nov 2005, 5:35 PM CST)

I agree about semantic meaning. I wonder if there is a service out there that lets you generate a categorical URL that might help--this still isn't getting at the core issue, but what if there was a Wordpress/CMS plug-in that let you generate third-level "tiny" URLs. You could just setup a HTTP redirect for this too I suppose. Here is an idea: setup "wishlist.matthom.com" to redirect to your long ugly Amazon (or the tinyURL I pasted above) and mail that out to family and friends. That way, you are even Amazon/website-independent!

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