#shortened — Public Fediverse posts

Walking Into Night

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Yesterday I was asked why I went to an ice rink, to stand around while people skated. The reason is that I wanted to go for my daily walk while the sun, or at least daylight, was still around. If I had set off later, then I would have been caught by the night, and I would have missed walking in daylight.

At this time of year, if you don't go for a walk before 17:00 you're likely to walk in the dark. In a city walking in the dark is fine, because there are usually quite a few lights, and because in a city night is lively, whereas in a village or town things are quieter.

As I drove home after lunch I saw the sun was out, and thought that I should go for a bike ride, but paradoxically I do not feel like riding at the moment. It's cold, so that's one reason. The second is that I don't want to deal with cars.

Less Cycling

On Friday I spoke about cycling, and it's common for people not to want to cycle, because of how people drive. I understand them. It's because I was in the safety of a group that I cycled so much this year. If I had been solo I would cycle as little as I have done in recent days.

Consistent Walks

I considered skating yesterday, but I am not as comfortable on skates as I was when I was younger. I already walk six kilometres, without adding the skating, so I get exercise.

Solitude Affective Disorder

For me the S in SAD is for solitude. At this time solitude is easy to have too much of. That's why I went out on Friday night, to see people in bars. That's why I was tired the next day and missed the bike ride, which is why I think I played a mobile phone game. Yesterday I had plans, but because they changed, I just went out, as the sun was setting. This used to be unusual. At this time of year going out as the sun sets is easy.

Sunday Rain

For the last two weeks rain has been announced. That's why I don't organise easy bike rides, or hikes. If it's raining, you can organise something but no one will come. Rain encourages people to stay indoors.

And Finally I'm Ready For a Change of Scenery

I feel ready for a change of scenery. I feel ready to drive for twelve hours to spend a few weeks in Spain. I could cycle. I could run. I could even take up cold water swimming, although that thought does not tempt me.

If not for a commitment on the ninth of December I think I would already have set off for Spain. I like to end the year there, especially since this is the Season of Solitude anyway. Driving to Spain is my tradition, and has been for years. I like to go in the low season, when there is less traffic and smaller crowds.

If the drive was shorter, I'd make the trip more often. I enjoy the drive itself but it's an endurance challenge.

#days #dusk #seasons #shortened #sunset #winter

Muʻumuʻu == shortened
#hawaiianWordOfTheDay #muumuu #shortened #HPR #HawaiianPublicRadio #hawaiian https://www.hawaiipublicradio.org/hawaiian-word-of-the-day-september-5th

The real reason Bill Shorten never made Prime Minister was how he ate the sausage #democracysausage #auspol #shorten #shortened #zinger

Telegram's CEO got arrested in the Le Bourget Airport by French authorities. Reasons being, lack of moderators in Telegram.
Credits: Reuters

#telegram #inshorts #reuters #news #developingnews #BreakingNews #russia #france #arrested #socialmedia #highlight #tldr #shortened

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Next year [all goo.gl shortened links will be dead due to the planned obscolence of hyperlinks](https://9to5google.com/2024/07/18/googl-links/). Any website, blog, or social media site that used Goo.gl shortened links will find that their links are worthless from that point on.

## The SMS Era on Twitter

URL shorteners thrived for a while because Twitter had a 140 character limit. This limit was put in place to allow for all tweets to be sent as SMS. Quite quickly Twitter found that sending SMS was too expensive so they abandonned the idea but the shortened URL stuck around.

The goal of the URL shortener was to make it easy to share hyperlinks on twitter, without the link counting towards the character limit. For a while URL shorteners thrived but as I said, years ago, shortened URLs are a security risk. This is because the hyperlink could be to anything. As the hyperlink is shortened we don’t know where we’re going.

## Obsure URLs

The other drawback with shortened URLs, and this is key, is that we don’t have any idea of the site, or article, they’re pointing to. This means that in 2025, when Goo.gl links are removed, plenty of website hyperlinks will be dead links.

If I wrote a tweet, or a blog post, and I used a shortened URL then a decade from now, if someone was to follow that link they would get stranded, not knowing where I had linked, or where to look for it in places like the web archive.

It’s one thing for a content creator to remove content from a website, but when a URL is destroyed it becomes absurd. With the demise of Goo.gl links, and probably t.co shortened links an entire era of the web will be harder to make sense of.

## An Opportunity

In theory this is an opportunity for a WordPress plugin to be made, that expands goo.gl hyperlinks to their full URL ahead of the shutting off of the URL shortened resolves. The plugin wouldn’t have a long shelf life, but it would simplify the process of ensuring that the goo.gl switch off has minimal effects.

## And Finally

URL shorteners had a very short period during which they were useful. Twitter quickly made it so that URLs were shortened internally, so the need for URL shorteners declined. It’s because of that decline that Google wants to kill yet another project. I never liked URL shorteners so I’m happy to see them vanish but having said that, I think plenty of content will be difficult to find next year.

https://www.main-vision.com/richard/blog/the-demise-of-shortened-google-links/

#Google #shortened #url #urlShorteners