A transmission from the deep south.
Andrew Pile on Vimeo’s staff blog:
Ever notice how hard it is to remember specific video URLs? http://vimeo.com/17853140 isn’t very descriptive is it? Today we’re rolling out a new option for every video that let’s you specify an alternative human-readable shortcut.
For now they’re redirects to the old, numeric URL format, but hey sometimes it’s the little things.
Site and bookmarklet by Matthew Freedman to create Flickr base-58 short URLs from an image’s full path. Update: Na Wong has another bookmarklet solution that displays the URL in a pretty overlay and sends it directly to Twitter. (via Preshit Deorukhkar)
Jarred Bishop’s new project is a song-a-day Tumblr utilising recent support for extracting album art from uploaded tracks. Simply brilliant, from the jewel case design to the single-character unicode URL.
An image processing and storage service with a URL-based API for creating thumbnails and other image transformations such as squaring, cropping, resizing and rotating. The service creates and hosts transformed versions of images from originals located anywhere online, using a URL structure like this:
http://urlimg.com/resize/300x400/example.com/image.jpg
A user account is required, with the first 50MB of images processed for free, and $0.01 per megabyte payable thereafter. I can think of one or two client sites without native image resizing this will be perfect for.
Based on aesthetic appeal and cleverness I went with mattbu.ch, despite it being slightly longer than the crowd favourite. Apache is configured to redirect the new domain to its longer counterpart, retaining the path string if it exists, and Tumblr helpfully expands post IDs into full post URLs. Each post now has a short URL link in its metadata created using the {PostID} custom tag.
Considering a short domain because you can’t trust tr.im these days.
matth.ws/123456
mattna.me/123456
mattbu.ch/123456
mat.tw/123456
Okay, don’t steal any of these or there’ll be trouble. Thanks. What do you like? Other suggestions?
Jarred Bishop’s Light Boner gets some theme love with an early version of his next theme, based on Cargo. Does some crazy nifty things with the Tumblr URL format in order to display posts on the index page. Niiice.
Jarred Bishop’s tool to locate the photo page from the URL of a Flickr image. More than useful for giving credit where it’s due.
Deep linking plugin from Asual, the people behind SWFAddress. (via David Kaneda)
This is what the big numbers in Dashboard page URLs are for… I always love the (rare) times when people notice this because it was my baby.
— Tumblr’s Marco Arment on the way the Dashboard prevents newly posted items from disturbing its pagination flow. I have noticed and loved this feature for some time. It’s up there with the way Tumblr rewrites search URLs containing query strings (to remove them), and — as previously noted — the plain text description of how long ago a post was made (eg. “9 minutes ago”).
Written and designed by Matthew Buchanan. Colophon. Please give credit. Email
