Vignette URLs

[greenwoodkl]

I heard rumor at some point about efforts to create user-friendly URLs for the Church site... Is there any progress in this arena?

[andersonj]

I hope there's some truth in the rumor - shorter, more user-friendly URL's would make it much easier to reference a specific website in print. In preparing a newsletter for our ward recently, we resorted to describing how to navigate to a certain page rather than having people try to type in a long string of numbers for the URL.

I can imagine that the current setup probably makes it easier to manage the content or something like that, but it creates challenges for those of us who want to use and point people to it.

[russellhltn]

You could always use something like TinyURL to get a short, printable URL.

There is a side effect: If you've got the direct link to an attachment, you don't need to log in to the local website to get it. <evil grin> It even works if the event is expired.

[tleish-p40]

At the tech talk forums last Thursday someone from the interaction design team said when they release the new lds.org in a short time, it will have friendly urls (i.e. http://www.lds.org/magazines/2007/january/ensign/). It's currently not on the beta site, but is scheduled to be released for the final version.

[barkeraj]

I was the guy who mentioned that it would be coming. I asked around about this and apparently this features is going to be delayed a little bit. It is still coming, but will not be available with the non-beta release of the new site.

You can imagine it is a big undertaking to take the existing URL's and make them friendly as the example above shows. So the developers are wanting to make sure to do it right and are taking the time to make that happen.

Apologies for any false hopes I may have started.

[davidjmiller]

I would love to see user friendly urls everywhere, but in my opinion, the most important section of lds.org already has user-friendly urls, scriptures.lds.org, so I don't complain. I just need to memorize all the right abbreviations for the various books (1_ne rather than 1ne for example).

[andersonj]

Shorter URLs, delayed or not, is still great news - thanks for the update. I'm sure it's a tremendous undertaking, considering how many pages there are, but a worthwhile one nevertheless.

I've used TinyURL before, but I've realized that I have no way of knowing what site one of those links will take me to until I click on the link. And who knows what will happen if you type in the wrong number in the link code. It's a great concept, but I'd much rather type in a short, real URL that I don't have to wonder where it leads to.

[cboyack-p40]

Tonight, Richard Miller had an interesting suggestion of including "tinyurl.com" functionality into lds.org, so that when posting something in a ward newsletter or in the Ensign, you could use lds.org/496 which would redirect to whatever the admins created that link for. So when the newsroom posts a link about new humanitarian aid, they can also create a permalink with that structure which can then be used by others for easy distribution instead of the longer, bulky URLs.

Other sites and magazines use this functionality. For example, in MacWorld magazine they post links at the end of stories such as "macworld.com/338" (or something like that) for readers to find more information, where the URL is just a redirect to the longer one.

Anywho, just thought I'd post Richard's idea here for others to read/comment on.

[JamesAnderson]

Thanks Barkeraj for the update. It makes alot of sense to have that part delayed slightly because of other fish you have to fry.

The links in the form described above are also very search-engine friendly. That iwll make them accessible more readily to Google and other search engines and much more likely to be picked up by them where they might not be right now in some cases. A few of the older ones and even many of the new ones have elements that are too long and the search engines' spidering software that grabs them sometimes has a cow.

[PhillipsCJ]

Are we talking about three different versions of the URLS?

1- The current URL
2- The URL of the content on the new site
3- The eventual user-friendly version of the URL's?

Any direction for sites who have a large number of links back to articles on LDS.org?