Items tagged urls in 2010
Filters: Year: 2010 × urls × Sorted by date
URL Design. Thoughtful tips on modern URL design, from GitHub designer Kyle Neath. GitHub has the best designed URLs of any application I can think of. # 31st December 2010, 10:03 am
Is it a good idea to allocate URLs such as quora.com/username to users?
There’s an interesting discussion about this issue on this question: How do sites prevent vanity URLs from colliding with future features ?
[... 42 words]Spacelog: space exploration stories from the original transcripts. The product of the most recent /dev/fort outing—a beautiful, web-native interface for browsing the NASA transcripts from the Apollo 13 and Mercury 6 missions (more to come). Every key moment has a URL. # 10th December 2010, 10:07 am
Porting Flickr to YUI 3: Lessons in Performance (at YUIConf 2010). Some very interesting tips here. The new Flickr photo pages suffered from what I’ve been calling “Flash of Un-Behavioured Content”, where slow loading JavaScript results in poor behaviour from some UI controls. They started using “Action Queueing”, where a small JS stub ensures a loading indicator is shown for clicks on features that have not yet fully loaded. Also, it turns out some corporate firewalls (Sonicwall in particular) dislike URLs over 1600 characters, and filter out any URL with xxx in it. # 10th November 2010, 6:33 pm
Is there any consensus yet on link rel=shorturl vs rev=canonical?
It’s pretty clear from the answers that rev=canonical v.s. rel=canonical is way too confusing—so it’s down to rel=shortlink v.s. rel=shorturl.
[... 38 words]Why doesn’t Facebook use nicer URLs?
Just noticed this link: http://www.facebook.com/notes/fa...—so it looks like things are beginning to improve.
[... 28 words]Why don’t more websites use alternative domains?
Because regular human beings don’t understand them, and expect everything to be a .com. Here’s an interesting post from 2007 on why Topix.net spent $1,000,000 buying the .com domain: http://www.skrenta.com/2007/03/k...
[... 45 words]How do sites prevent vanity URLs from colliding with future features ?
For wildlifenearyou.com and djangopeople.net I used the same trick as described by others in this list—an enormous blacklist of everything I could possibly want to use for a future feature.
[... 157 words]The Web for me is still URLs and HTML. I don’t want a Web which can only be understood by running a JavaScript interpreter against it.
— Me, on Twitter # 27th September 2010, 4:37 pm
apache.org incident report for 04/09/2010. An issue was posted to the Apache JIRA containing an XSS attack (disguised using TinyURL), which stole the user’s session cookie. Several admin users clicked the link, so JIRA admin credentials were compromised. The attackers then changed the JIRA attachment upload path setting to point to an executable directory, and uploaded JSPs that gave them backdoor access to the file system. They modified JIRA to collect entered passwords, then sent password reset e-mails to team members and captured the new passwords that they set through the online form. One of those passwords happened to be the same as the user’s shell account with sudo access, leading to a full root compromise of the machine. # 14th April 2010, 9:08 am
RFC5785: Defining Well-Known Uniform Resource Identifiers (via) Sounds like a very good idea to me: defining a common prefix of /.well-known/ for well-known URLs (common metadata like robots.txt) and establishing a registry for all such files. OAuth, OpenID and other decentralised identity systems can all benefit from this. # 11th April 2010, 7:32 pm
Introduction to Surlex. A neat drop-in alternative for Django’s regular expression based URL parsing, providing simpler syntax for common path patterns. # 11th April 2010, 7:23 pm
“Tis Pity We Called Her A Whore” And Other Ineffectual Digital Apologies. A useful reminder that URLs can be libellous. # 16th March 2010, 10:38 am
Some People Can’t Read URLs. Commentary on the recent “facebook login” incident from Jono at Mozilla Labs. I’d guess that most people can’t read URLs, and it worries me more than any other aspect of today’s web. If you want to stay safe from phishing and other forms of online fraud you need at least a basic understanding of a bewildering array of technologies—URLs, paths, domains, subdomains, ports, DNS, SSL as well as fundamental concepts like browsers, web sites and web servers. Misunderstand any of those concepts and you’ll be an easy target for even the most basic phishing attempts. It almost makes me uncomfortable encouraging regular people to use the web because I know they’ll be at massive risk to online fraud. # 2nd March 2010, 10:16 am