Although there are numerous free shortening URL services such as bit.ly, TinyUrl.com, and ow.ly that cut the length of elongated web addresses and even offer limited customizable URLs, mostly conveniently for micro-blogging such as posting Twitter updates due to the restrictions of a 140 character length.  While many tweets do include shorten versions of lengthier URLs, it’s always best to be resourceful with characters to convey a coherent message to avoid any confusion for followers.

Disadvantages of Shorter URLs

Just as one website owner argues the advantages of shortening a URL address, others adamantly oppose the position citing several very valid points.  Perhaps the greatest marketing drawback of a shorter URL is the potential of losing your company’s brand.  The majority of professional websites begin with a recognizable and unique domain name that customers quickly become familiar with after only a couple of visits.   If the URL is shorter, the uniqueness quality is lost as well as the potential for successful promoting and branding position in a specific niche.

Another disadvantage of shortening a URL is the simple fact it confuses new visitors, prospective sale leads and of course, existing customer base in terms of e-commerce ventures.  It’s important to remember when setting up your website to keep it as user-friendly as possible.  Visitors and customers want quick and easy access to information with the ability to bookmark favorite pages without digging through history files to retrace visited websites without valid URL indicators.

Website owners interested in shortening URLs should keep in mind a couple of other concerns.  The first being the fact that tweaking URLs make them more susceptible to hacker attacks and even click stealing.  Another con is that if the chosen shortening service used goes financially under, all associated website links also go permanently offline.  There can also be a short term issue with URL shortening services when the service goes temporarily goes off-line due to user overload or other server nuisances.

Conclusion

Although many web owners opt to shorten long URL addresses, others remain steadfast on the originality of long domain names.

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About mod_rewrite for Apache

This module uses a rule-based rewriting engine (based on a regular-expression parser) to rewrite requested URLs on the fly. It supports an unlimited number of rules and an unlimited number of attached rule conditions for each rule to provide a really flexible and powerful URL manipulation mechanism. The URL manipulations can depend on various tests, for instance server variables, environment variables, HTTP headers, time stamps and even external database lookups in various formats can be used to achieve a really granular URL matching.

This module operates on the full URLs (including the path-info part) both in per-server context (httpd.conf) and per-directory context (.htaccess) and can even generate query-string parts on result. The rewritten result can lead to internal sub-processing, external request redirection or even to an internal proxy throughput.

But all this functionality and flexibility has its drawback: complexity. So don’t expect to understand this entire module in just one day.

Using Apache’s mod_rewrite

The Apache module mod_rewrite can be used to perform various forms of URI acrobatic manipulation. A prerequisite concept before attempting to understand mod_rewrite are regular expressions.

When a URL is requested by a server, this does not necessarily map directly to the server’s filesystem. This request can be twisted and turned to (hopefully) present more sense to the browsing user.

Why should I care?

A clean URL is part of a good user experience. It works as a breadcrumb trail – allowing the user to see where they are located in the site, it doesn’t break in bookmarks, you can easily send it over email, and allows users to guess where they want to go next. Most importantly a easy to read URL will be indexed by search engines such as Google. Having all your pages indexed creates a huge advantage to getting visitors to your website. Many search engine robots cannot read a URL with symbols such as ? & or commas and therefor not indexing your website.

This is all possible by using human-readable URLs:

“In principle, users should not need to know about URLs which are a machine-level addressing scheme. In practice, users often go to websites or individual pages through mechanisms that involve exposure to raw URLs.” — Jakob Neilsen, Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, March 21, 1999: URL as UI

“a URL should contain human-readable directory and file names that reflect the nature of the information space.” — Jakob Nielsen, item #4 Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design

By choosing a well thought-out URL, you won’t have to change it during the next re-organization. URLs that remain the same tend to pick up more links over time.

Getting started:

First, Apache must be compiled with the mod_rewrite module for any of this to take place. Insert these lines into the vhost definition for the domain that you want to work with.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteLog /path/to/logs/server.rewrite.txt
RewriteLogLevel 1

The first line turns the RewriteEngine on. Otherwise, extra code doesn’t get processed by the Apache webserver. Next, we specify where the logfile that records the rewrite activity should be placed. This is mostly for debugging, as your CustomLog should be keeping track of traffic.

A beginning example:

One of the simplest uses of mod_rewrite is to re-direct a web request from one page to another. Many times this will be done if the first has expired, was spelled wrong, or the site has a new naming scheme. It’s nice to forward new users to the correct page in case they have the previous one bookmarked, or if a search engine has cached the old location.

RewriteRule ^/biogarphy.php3 /biography/ [R=301]

This forwards a browser request from one page to the other. because the [R=301] at the end. I’ve taken a file that was spelled wrong, and fixed it at the same time removing a an old filetype suffix. (php4 has replaced that suffix with .php) What if I were to dump php from my system, and go with *.html, *.jsp, or even *.willie? By rewriting my URI to look like a directory, it doesn’t matter what filetype I’m using, nor what my DirectoryIndex options are.

Compound Example:

What if you used the above example, but didn’t decide to create a “biography” directory at your Doc-root? Apache can still be told where the content resides by including another RewriteRule following the first. Rules will continue attempting to match until a “last” case is presented with the [L] modifier at the end. This is much like a switch programming structure, using break to prevent each option from being executed.

RewriteRule ^/biography/ /biogarphy.php3 [L]

This might seem a little redundant, since we just did the opposite. This line will tell requests to “biography” to read the content from /biogarphy.php3 instead of looking for a biography directory. Confusing? Well, I could do this instead:

RewriteRule ^/(.+)/?$ /content/$1.php [L]

I can search on anything that follows the beginning slash, and replace the file request to look for that file in the content directory through the use of the regular expression and the backreference.

I’ve also placed this inside another directory that I don’t necessarily want the browsing user to see, or know about, but it’s easier for the webmaster to keep track of the roles of each file on the site. Since I’ve upgraded from php3 to php4 the suffix has changed.

More Advanced – the Query String:

The query string is passed in separately from the URL. This means that a simple regex doesn’t necessarily do the trick, but a compound statement using RewriteCond (condition) is required.

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} id=([^&;]*)
RewriteRule ^/$ http://%{SERVER_NAME}/%1/? [R]
RewriteRule ^/([^\/]*)/?$ /index.php?id=$1 [L]

The RewriteCondition matches only when the following condition is true, and continues until a “last” [L] is stated. The Condition’s backreferences are different, using the % prefix, and their scope lasts beyond the Condition line.

This above example would translate “/?id=home” into “/home/”, and then re-assign the value of “home” to the id HTTP_GET_VAR. One more thing to notice here is that the the second line has a trailing ? – this is used to negate copying of the query string into the new, re-directed URI.

More Reference Links:

http://www.engelschall.com/pw/apache/rewriteguide/

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/mod/mod_rewrite.html

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/misc/rewriteguide.html

Source: webhostgear.com

The Purpose of .CO Domains

The .CO domains do not have any particular purpose, however they are now being used for all sorts of commercial purposes including but not limited to eCommerce, personal blogging, picture sites, music sites, and video sites, social sites, news sites, sports sites and any other kind of web site imaginable. Twitter is using a .co domain as a link service, however many are under the impression that this site will be used to shorten .co domains, even though it is actually intended to do much more as an overall link service for Twitter that indexes all links and collects information about them for Twitter. They are also supposed to be using the domain as a link shortener as well for Twitter development purposes. Many people wonder how Twitter got a one letter .CO domain when a normal person can only purchase a three letter domain and others are considered invalid in domain registrar databases. According to the news, Twitter paid more than a quarter million dollars for T.CO, its new .CO link service.

Shorter .CO URLs

Twitter in the aforementioned example is just one of many large web sites that are purchasing and utilizing a .co domain to shorten their domain name. Overstock.com also purchases O.CO, which is perhaps one of the most memorable web sites ever bought. Overstock’s search engine optimization specialist stated that he believes the new domain will bring in twice the amount of traffic tot he Overstock web site within the coming decade. It should be noted however that the average site owner will not be able to afford one of these one or two letter domain names, as Overstock paid more than $300,000 for O.CO.

New Brands and .CO Domains

Even though you can’t find a two or three letter .co domain, it is still very possible to purchase .co domains that have very basic keywords in them. For example, it may still be possible to purchase a 6 or 7 letter .co domain that is an actual word or existing product of some sort. Since .CO domains have just been released to the public for sale, there are many .CO domains are available that have .com counterparts. For example, there may be a web site entitled example.com. A couple of months ago you may have been able to purchase example.co, even though you are not the owner of example.com. This would give you the opportunity to capitalize on the popularity of an existing web site.

Source: webhostinggeeks.com