Here’s another reason not to use URL shorteners, especially when there’s no real need to use a shortened URL. Like, in an automated email and after you already had the chance to catch my clicks through multiple redirects. Yes, I’m talking about Summify’s broken link shortener and they are aware of the issue.
@holgr We’re working on it 🙁
— Cristian Strat (@cgst) January 8, 2012
Update:
@holgr We reverted to our own URL shortener but existing links still won’t work until ow.ly is back.
— Cristian Strat (@cgst) January 8, 2012
This is the currently broken was the situation at Summify.
$ curl -i http://email.summify.com/wf/click?c=looooooooongstring
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Sun, 08 Jan 2012 18:18:44 GMT
Server: Apache
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.3.2-1ubuntu4.7
Location: http://summify.com/redirect/anotherlooongstring
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Length: 0
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8$ curl -i http://summify.com/redirect/anotherlooongstring
HTTP/1.1 302 FOUND
Server: nginx/0.7.67
Date: Sun, 08 Jan 2012 18:18:56 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Connection: keep-alive
Vary: Cookie
Location: http://smf.is/1Dxxat
Set-Cookie: sessionid=0deadbeef3; Domain=.summify.com; expires=Sun, 06-Jan-2013 18:18:56 GMT; Max-Age=31449600; Path=/$ curl -i http://smf.is/1Dxxat
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Date: Sun, 08 Jan 2012 18:19:01 GMT
Server: Apache
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.4-2ubuntu5.6
Set-Cookie: SMFISSID=0deadbeef3; path=/
Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Pragma: no-cache
X-Gridnum: 1
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Length: 2249
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html
By the way, Owly, you might want to check the HTML in your 404 error page.
Oh and while we’re at it: Why do you still use bitly (or any other link shortener) on Twitter, especially if you’re linking to your very own site? Enjoy breaking your links.