[LINK] E-mail question

[Eleanor Lister]

Ivan Trundle wrote:
>
> On 12/06/2007, at 3:16 PM, Pilcher, Fred wrote:
>
>> My 2c (and worth every penny):
>>
>> Clearly it's a dog's breakfast out there in e-mail client land, and
>> that's none of our doing. If there's a no-hassle way that we can give
>> people reliable links, I think we should do so.
>>
>> Perhaps you could provide the original *and* the tinyurl?
>
> Thanks, Fred, but no...
>
> It crosses the line of professionalism and confidentiality, from our
> business perspective. And is labour-intensive, to boot.
>
> Whilst I concur that as a service to clients that URLs should be
> reliable, using TinyURL as part of a web-based business is the
> equivalent of selling a Rolls Royce and using Trabant parts. Our
> clients wouldn't wear it, and it would harm our business to permit
> another website to store this kind of information, for either short or
> long-term purposes.
>
> But I can do the TinyURL thing manually, anyway: by a small script on
> my own site to redirect to the longer URL. It's messy, and would take
> a lot of effort, since we send out hundreds of unique URLs per week.
>
> Confidentiality and privacy are issues that we simply don't want to
> farm out to third parties (the URLs in question are unique identifiers
> for a particular purpose: mostly survey work).
>
> Warmly
>
> iT 

if it's just your own site, then maybe you should instantiate a
.htaccess file that maps to /from short URLS automatically using rewrite
rules.

E.G: this is still longish, but not ridiculous:
http://portjackson.nsw.greens.org.au/PagEd-index-topic_id-8-page_id-88.htm

regards,
    EL

------------
Eleanor Ashley Lister
South Sydney Greens
http://ssg.nsw.greens.org.au
webmistress at ssg.nsw.greens.org.au