Scott Hanselman on URL Shortener Redirects

Scott Hanselman:

I saw a URL today on Twitter to an article on Slate.com. It was a custom short URL - http://slate.me/1h0svt8 but since I was visiting it via Twitter, it was wrapped with Twitter’s t.co URL, so I really started at http://t.co/sxSvcJnT2L.

When I visited it for the FIRST time, I got this lovely HTTP interaction. That’s SEVEN HTTP 301s, count them, 7, before I get to the destination page.

Slate is effectively doing the opposite of what I’ve done with DF short URLs.

(Via Michael Tsai.)

Monday, 9 June 2014