Digg Relents on DiggBar, But URL Shortening Is Still a Problem
In response to a significant outcry from site owners and search engine experts, news aggregation site Digg says it will change the way its new DiggBar site-framing and URL-shrotening tool works.
Digg says it will be changing the DiggBar’s default behavior so the bar will only appear if you’re logged in to Digg. Also, Digg says it is ensuring Digg URLs will not show up in search engine results. The changes solve the major problem most critics had with the DiggBar, but they don’t address the larger problem of URL shorteners.
URL shorteners are a sort of linkrot apocalypse waiting to happen. TinyURL.com and Bit.ly have been around for a while, but hundreds of other URL shortening services have blossomed recently, thanks to Twitter’s coral reef effect. Should any of these services disappear, all the redirect links contained within go with them.
Then there’s the problem that shortened URLs could lead anywhere ��� a spam site, a phishing site, a porn site, a malware site. Who knows?
Several possible solutions are being discussed, including using an HTML headtag to let webpage authors specify their own short URLs, relying on sites like Twitter and Facebook to implement their own URL shorteners and even the possibility that existing URL shorteners could offer a way to map one’s own domain onto theirs, making it possible to export data and take your short links wherever you wanted.
So far there is no clear winner, though some use of HTML headtags like rel=”short_url” or rev=”canonical” seem to emerging as the most likely solution. However, rev=”canonical” is not only incredibly complicated, but it’s also not part of the HTML 5 spec and seems unlikely to catch on.
It’s possible that Twitter will step up and offer a solution, but if you don’t want to wait, there is a tried and true method of solving the problem — do it yourself.
Building a URL shortening service is relatively simple. You just need a database to store the short and long URLs and a script to access them. If you use Django, there’s already an application ready to go. Ditto for Rails, WordPress and several other popular frameworks and content management systems.
Of course, just because you’re doing it yourself doesn’t mean you’re free of the problems with URL shorteners — you can still end up with a corrupt database, lose a domain name or have your server hijacked. But at least with the DIY method, you’re in control.
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