993023 - Reconsider URL gibberish in makes

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Webmaker Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Laura Hilliger [:epilepticrabbit]]

The new Thimble URLs have strings of letters and numbers.

From the people side, this makes things difficult. Particularly when teaching, as we tend to say URLs out loud, write them on big sheets of paper and otherwise share in a non-digital copy/paste kind of way.

Comment 1

[Chris DeCairos (:cade)]

Does it make sense to provide a shortened url (like bit.ly) in a make's details page? It could simplify sharing while keeping the convenience of not having title conflicts.

Comment 2

[Pomax]

There are a couple of things we can do here, some of which are solutions that don't involve changing how to the code works at all. For instance, would it make sense to just use bitly or mzlla to give people a supershort URL instead? That way no code changes are necessary and important URLs are easy to share. 

Alternatively, we can change the code so that the project IDs are easier to read but then we're pushing the problem to the future instead of solving it - once the number of publish projects gets high enough, it'll be an unpronouncible long "random string" again.

(I'm kind of leaning towards the bitly/mzzla solution, personally, since it makes sense to treat important URLs differently by creating a short vanity URL using a URL shortener for them)

Comment 3

[Pomax]

Saw cade's comment - I don't know how much sense it makes to abuse bit.ly that way; it depends a little on how many URLs need to be shared in a setting where there is no copy paste or auto-post to twitter/facebook/etc.

Comment 4

[Chris DeCairos (:cade)]

Well, Bit.ly has an API http://dev.bitly.com/api.html

What I meant in Comment 1 is that we could provide a button to generate a shortened link for copying. Not necessarily for the social media sharing options.

Comment 5

[Chris DeCairos (:cade)]

Boo, it requires authentication using oauth

Comment 6

[David Humphrey (:humph)]

Brett, when do we want to do this, and who?

Comment 7

[Brett Gaylor [:brett]]

So, after some discussion in IRC, we don't have a way to add the unique name programatically to our bit.ly short link creator.  So this isn't really solving the problem.

Unfortunately we'll need to go back to that blog post and clarify how users should actually search for makes.