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Comment by jaysonelliot | Hacker News Reader

I publish a print magazine. Up to this point, we've avoided printing URLs in the magazine, because our printed issues may last longer than the links will stay live.

To solve the problem, we're launching our own link shortener this month, and printing our own shortened links in the magazine. That way we can control what happens when link rot sets in, whether redirecting or caching content on our own servers if necessary (and allowed by copyright).

The side benefit is that all our printed links can be easy to read and type, an important usability concern when dealing with print. A little self-referential branding on the shortener doesn't hurt, either.

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Except that your shortener service won't last as long as your print issues either. With the original URL there's still the hope that the Wayback Machine is still maintained and had visited the page. It's a hard problem.

They could simply list the expanded links on the last page of the magazine.

Exactly, or even just issue a yearly book containing the entire mapping. That would save printing since most people probably don't currently care about the expanded form, though in the future they would still be able to look it up in the library system. (They could also start doing this now, while they can't just retroactively add the expanded forms to editions they have already printed.)

Does any existing publication do this? Because providing both shortened and full URLs like this sounds like a great (i.e., retrospectively obvious) way to achieve a balance between "UX" of the magazine and longevity.

Yes. CrossRef.org, which is the registration agency for DOIs (digital object identifiers) does this for URLs in basically the entire scholarly publishing industry. This combats link rot by ensuring that the database of metadata is always up-to-date, and with other initiatives.

I think this is a great idea. The casual reader will type in the short url (giving the publisher tracking and control), but the expansion will be available long as the print issue survives. This still fails if only an article survives (by clipping, photocopy, etc), but that seems like an acceptable tradeoff.

And until it's a common idea it would be helpful to annotate such shortened links so that someone unfamiliar with the publisher will recognize them as having a printed expansion included. Superscript "*" usually refers to a note on that page, so perhaps a superscript ">>"?

If not for copyright, a magazine page could probably store a compressed copy of every cited url.

I suppose one might argue that this is an educational use. It's for future academics and has no commercial impact.

Probably best to list both the original URL, and some kind of link that has an archived version (either your own, or from the Wayback Machine). And of course include the date as well. With the date and the original URL, you can always use the Wayback machine or some other archival service like WebCite to attempt to find an archived version.

No citation is guaranteed to be readable after a certain amount of time. All citations are merely a reference for identify the resource that you're looking for, and you need to find it yourself in a library or from the publisher. But the publisher may not exist, you may not be able to find libraries with copies, etc. So, you can only do so much.

But if you cite the URL and date, and at least one alternative way to access the content like the Wayback Machine or WebCite or your own, you give people a pretty good chance.

Perhaps there needs to be a peer-to-peer web citation database that publishers, libraries, and individuals can join. When a book or journal contains a web citation, the publisher archives a copy of that page in their database. When a library or individual buys a book, they can pull the archived copies from the publishers. This will ensure that as long as someone out there who has a copy of the book has also maintained their web citation database and is on the network, you can pull the citations from them.

I believe that archiving of publicly available material, as archive.org does and Google's cache does, is considered not to be copyright infringement (as long as it obeys the limits in robots.txt and noarchive meta tags), as it is sufficiently transformative. So this shouldn't be a problem unless someone explicitly requested that the page not be archived, in which case you probably shouldn't rely on it for a citation.

They could easily have a bot that checks for 404's or substantially changed content for each URL in the shortener database, and informs the shortener. When that occurs, they could have the shortener send the user to either a stored snapshot or cached version of the page that they host with a short note explaining that the content of the original link appears to be gone.

I suggest you take a look at the perma.cc initative. There's no reason to reinvent the robust shortlink, and you won't be obligated to run this system forever.

fantastic - simple easy solution to the basic problem, supported by a university that is not going anywhere soon. well worth getting into a habit for

It's not just supported by a single university, but multiple university libraries on multiple continents, as well as archive.org.

Perma.cc appears to be targeted at links in published journals:

After the paper has been submitted to a journal, the journal staff checks that the provided Perma.cc link actually represents the cited material. If it does, the staff “vests” the link and it is forever preserved. Links that are not “vested” will be preserved for two years, at which point the author will have the option to renew the link for another two years.

I'm sure they'll be willing to work with other publishers as well. From talking to the project manager, they don't seem to have any goal of restricting this to academic publications.

"Once a link is vested, it will never be deleted unless we receive a legitimate legal order to take it down."

That seems odd to me. Could they simply publish their mappings periodically to avoid being able to fully comply with takedowns?

I mean, the article using the link is already published, what legitimate reason could there ever be to destroy a link in it? What would these people issuing the hypothetical takedown do if the author of the paper had just included the link itself?

Also look at digital object identifiers (DOI).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_object_identifier

This is cool, do the universities digitally archive copies of the stuff themselves or just Internet Archive on behalf of them?

From what I understand, all the member libraries are storing some part of the cache. They might not all have a complete copy, but the details aren't clear yet.

I think this is science fiction at this point.

> we're launching our own link shortener this month, and printing our own shortened links in the magazine. That way we can control what happens when link rot sets in, whether redirecting or caching content on our own servers if necessary (and allowed by copyright).

That seems worse to me. Sometimes you can gain some info by just the hostname, and pages in the URL. Now all you'll see is random numbers.

And are you really going to spend the money to check every url you have ever published? You have to do it by hand you know. A tool can help but won't tell you if the content of the page changed.

If you want to do this properly use global footnote numbering in each issue. Publish the real URL and the page title (very important since you can google for those words). Each url gets a footnote number that is unique in that issue and you print the number near the url.

Readers can lookup a url by the magazine issue and footnote number.

> You have to do it by hand you know.

Periodically iterating through a set of links and comparing the returned content to a cached copy is trivial to implement.

Websites change all the time, while still having the same basic content.

So as I said, a tool can help, but it won't be trivial, and you'll still have lots of manual work.

I remember PC World started doing this back in like 2003. Makes sense, I think. But how are you solving the problem any better than a reader can armed with (1) the date on your cover, (2) the original URL, and (3) the Internet Archive Wayback Machine? Are you aggressively caching every page, even if you don’t make the cache public for a number of years?

Many links usually 301 redirect for a while before dying. Maybe it helps in those cases to update the shortened URL to point to the new link.

Do that automatically, and you'll wind up with a lot of broken URLs. Routinely, when fixing broken links on my own site, I punch something in the IA, click on the latest version - and get redirected to the root of some site or other. Not very useful. (The redirect also makes it hard to get back to the URL search results because the IA redirects you so fast that if you simply hit the 'back button', you won't go anywhere.)

we did that on folha de s.paulo newspaper in brazil in the late 90's

but mostly to link to the online version of the site the newspaper owned. it was a way to give out more data for a news piece that could not fit in the paper. Usually external urls were printed in the paper anyway.

I suppose it doesn't hurt that you can also then glean statistics over what your readers are checking out.

What's the additional cost to maintain something like this long-term?

I'm just thinking about articles that could be 10-15 years old (10-15 years from now mind you.), you could have a substantial database of links to maintain and keep updated, not a small task.

What a great idea and an interesting use of URL-shortening technology. Kudos!

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