Yeah, Trey, it was your link in Twitter that borked my instance of Firefox :-)
It reminded me of something else, though - I have absolutely no idea, most of the time, what the links are that I see in Twitter messages when folks use TinyURL to fit their finds into that brief 140 character space. Had I known that Trey's link would take me to a page that contained embedded QuickTime (and as a fan of Apple's movie trailer page, I'd have known), I could have held off until I was at home (or, GASP! used IE...).
This got me thinking - is there any way that you could improve TinyURL so viewers could know in advance where they were clicking? More folks than just myself browse from highly restrictive corporate networks, and I inhale a sharp breath every time I see that "restricted content" page here in the office (they claim to be logging the incident...but I've never been contacted).
So I surfed to TinyURL's site to double check the process for creating the contracted resource locators, and lo! you have the option to provide a preview URL. Sure, this preview link creates an extra step for the casual web surfer, but it's certainly safer than blindly clicking links.
Where do we go from here? Well, I wish Twitterrific provided a choice in the preferences to use a standard TinyURL or a preview URL instead of only using the standard TinyURL. But there's part of me that doesn't want the browsing experience broken in such a way. What I really want is some sort of tool tip when you hover over the link - something that provides a short description, or perhaps the full URL. Of course, not being a web developer, I don't know how to accomplish this without using some sort of script.
Any ideas? I think this is a useful itch to scratch.
It reminded me of something else, though - I have absolutely no idea, most of the time, what the links are that I see in Twitter messages when folks use TinyURL to fit their finds into that brief 140 character space. Had I known that Trey's link would take me to a page that contained embedded QuickTime (and as a fan of Apple's movie trailer page, I'd have known), I could have held off until I was at home (or, GASP! used IE...).
This got me thinking - is there any way that you could improve TinyURL so viewers could know in advance where they were clicking? More folks than just myself browse from highly restrictive corporate networks, and I inhale a sharp breath every time I see that "restricted content" page here in the office (they claim to be logging the incident...but I've never been contacted).
So I surfed to TinyURL's site to double check the process for creating the contracted resource locators, and lo! you have the option to provide a preview URL. Sure, this preview link creates an extra step for the casual web surfer, but it's certainly safer than blindly clicking links.
Where do we go from here? Well, I wish Twitterrific provided a choice in the preferences to use a standard TinyURL or a preview URL instead of only using the standard TinyURL. But there's part of me that doesn't want the browsing experience broken in such a way. What I really want is some sort of tool tip when you hover over the link - something that provides a short description, or perhaps the full URL. Of course, not being a web developer, I don't know how to accomplish this without using some sort of script.
Any ideas? I think this is a useful itch to scratch.