Saturday, July 12, 2003

HaloScan, links, and URLs

Readers:

Links in HaloScan comments are not reliable. HaloScan seems to accept links of the following form:

<a href="http://www.google.com/foo"> ... </a>

but that's it. IOW, everything after a "?" or a "#" just gets truncated.

So until HaloScan fixes this bug, it would probably be best for the blog if readers just did URLs in the form of straight text, right in the comment:

http://www.google.com/foo?id=XXXXXX

The convenience of being able to click on some links is far outweighed by the frustration of clicking other links and having them turn out to be broken -- and we do like to track down those links!

Many thanks for your comments!

UPDATE: Alert reader Beth adds:

If it's a very long link, it would be better to avoid screwing up the width of the comments page by inserting a space in the middle like this:

www.fakelink.com/too-long/so-i-insert-space-here/
inconvenient/for-copy-paste/but-good-for-reading.htm

UPDATE: Alert reader Nathanile adds:

For long links, go to

http://tinyurl.com

You just paste the long url into their form, and it will return a very short one.

This :
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/from_our_own_correspondent/1075624.stm

becomes:

http://tinyurl.com/gqr8