URL’s In Printed Media

I was reading an article in a magazine last week and while I don’t exactly recall the magazine or the topic right now I distinctly remember mild annoyance at the editor’s decision to put list of URL’s at the end of the piece. Not that it’s a bad practice in itself but some of the listed links were actually pointing to Youtube videos. Youtube URL’s are not that long or difficult, but I don’t think they were designed to be used in printed media. For one, they use a cryptic case sensitive argument at the end which is a pain in the ass to type. I mean, look at it – the thing is ugly and awkward to type:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0

It’s actually easier and quicker to simply google the videos in question by their title rather than even attempt to type the address by hand. It reminds me of the tricky exercise typing Microsoft’s CD product keys during activation. You hardly ever get them right on the first try. Not that I don’t appreciate the gesture but there is this dissonance between print media and electronic media. When you print URL’s you ought to keep their typability (is that a word?) in mind.

A lot of magazines do something different. They simply refer the reader to the online version of the article or specially prepared page on their website which contains the relevant links. This is an improvement, but you still usually end up with a fairly long URL’ which includes stuff like the publication date, the volume number, author’s name or all of the above. Sometimes the damn thing is to long, and they simply print a blurb to visit their site, and leave locating the right page as an exercise to the reader.

If I was distributing my content via printed media and had to cite online resources quite often, I’d probably look into URL shortening instead. I actually haven’t seen this being done on a bigger scale in magazines, but private people do it all the time. For example, Twitter users utilize services such as TinyURL, Snurl, is.gd or Twurl to post long addresses without exhausting the 140 character limit. So instead of a long ass Youtube link with a 10+ character alphanumeric, case sensitive argument you use something like this:

http://is.gd/AJ

Can you see the difference? First URL is extremely easy to mistype. The second one, almost impossible to get wrong.

Naturally, there is a downside to using a 3rd party URL shortening service – especially in print. The URL is no longer meaningful. In my first example, you at least know I’m sending you to a Youtube video. In the second one it’s not that clear. Furthermore, you are routing your visitor traffic through someone else’s service which may or may not be reliable or trustworthy. While you can get away with it in handouts for your class presentation or an informal documentation it is probably not recommended for official brochures, posters or other materials of that nature. It simply doesn’t look professional.

You want to use URL shortening though – just not the generic services open to anyone on the internet. What you ought to do is to roll your own. The added benefit is that you will get the first pickings on the really short 2 and 3 character URL’s which should last you for a while – which is usually not the case with services used by thousands of people.

How do you create your own URL shortening service? One way is to simply grab an off the shelf solution like Get Shorty. It is free, PHP + MySQL based donationware that does precisely what tinyurl and friends do, but on your own server. It actually gives you a choice on how you want to generate your shortened URL’s – it can do the semi-random 3-4 chacacter codes just like all the services out there, or it can prompt you for custom keywords – so you can actually construct your URL like so:

http://mydomain.com/my/keywords/here

This makes for nice readable URL’s that still retain your domain name (for the purpose of quality control, branding and etc..) but seamlessly redirect your users to relevant URL’s while giving them a hint of where they will be going as well.

Alternatively of course you could create your own system. It’s actually not that difficult to do this. First you will need a database. Let’s make it really easy and just use two fields – the ID and URL:

CREATE TABLE shorturl (
	id INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, 
	url TEXT, 
	PRIMARY KEY(url));

If you didn’t notice, I just killed two birds with one stone here. The id is set to auto increment so it will generate unique values for us for free. Naturally this is tad limited as you will quickly run out of the nice 1, 2 and 3 character id’s but it’s simple and reliable.

Next, we need some .htaccess magic:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /short/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /forward.php [L]

This should forward every link to a non-existent file in the directory /short/ to a script called forward.php. Then inside our script we do the following:

$id = end(explode("/", $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']));
$result = mysql_query("SELECT id FROM shorturl where url='$id'");
$resultarray = mysql_fetch_array($result);
header("Location:".$resultarray['id']);

The REQUEST_URI gives me the address from which the user was redirected to my forwarding script. Whatever is behind the last “/” is my shortened id value. Once I grab that, I just need to look it up in the database, and then redirect you by sending your browser the “Location” header. Let’s say someone goes to the following URL:

http://mydomain.com/short/123

The script will look up 123 in the database, and then redirect this person to relevant URL that if finds.

Naturally, it will blow up in a very un-graceful way if the id is not found. I’m not really doing any error checking or validation here – I’m just illustrating the concept here. So don’t be copying and pasting this into any production code because it is likely wrong. Also, if it doesn’t work at all, let me know and post corrections because I admit I didn’t really test this. As I’m typing this it’s 2am so give me a break. :P

If you look at the get-shorty code you will note that they do it slightly differently, but I didn’t want to blatantly rip them off. There is clearly more than one way to do it, and you can probably vastly improve my .htaccess code up there.

I really think this is the way to go for print friendly URL’s. It’s easy to implement (I just did it and I’m half asleep) and it gives the reader easy to type shortcut that will take him directly to the resource without unnecessary searching or pit stops along the way.

[tags]tinyurl, url, url shortening, urls in print[/tags]