I haven’t put up a technology-oriented post in awhile, but, then again, I haven’t been doing much web design this summer. This week I’ve started working on my course website for the fall, and thought I might share a cool, free web2.0 tool that really helps with standards compliance: tinyURL.
Next semester I am requiring my students to read one book on the social / economic / cultural / political / legal impact of technology. I created a list of possible books (and am looking for more–please leave suggestions in the comments) for my syllabus, creating a link to the amazon page for each suggestion. Since students will end up writing a review of the book for amazon, this seems like a good place to have them start. The problem: Amazon uses hideously long URLs full of the kind of code that drives the w3c (x)HTML standards validator crazy. As in 150 errors crazy. Solution: tinyURL. TinyURL creates a redirect that it stores on its servers–users will never know that they’ve clicked on this redirect. Amazon looses the page rank benefits of the link, but, hey, that’s what they get for not providing standards- compliant URLs in the first place.
