If you read Clarissa’s Blog in your Google Reader, I have a huge favor to ask of you. Could you click on an article from this blog in your Reader and tell me what the URL looks like.
Does it look like this:
Feed%3A+Phytophactor+%28The+Phytophactor%29&utm_content=Google+Reader
Or do you see a shorter, cleaner version that is like this:
http://phytophactor.fieldofscience.com/2012/08/a-bird-picture.html
Please tell me in the comment sections.
The reason I ask is that some blogs offer the longer URL when you click on them from the Google Reader and I end up quoting those blogs less because it’s often a drag to find a shorter URL that can be used for creating a link. There are two blogs in particular that I stopped linking to altogether for this reason. Now I’m wondering if my blog has the same problem.
Clarissa's Blog 
Yes yours look the same and it’s not a problem – it provides info where the link came from (utm_source=feedburner, etc.). Same happens if you click on a link in twitter, you get the utm_source=twitter, also in youtube and so on.
It’s easy to get the short original url though: just delete everything after the first occurence of .html (compare the two links that you provided and you’ll see what I mean – they are identical until the end of html).
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This does not make me happy. Why do some blogs offer good links immediately?
Thank you for telling me, though!
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Ditto on what Pika said. I’ve been chopping off that extra bit for my Weekly Mashup posts for ages. The only other way to avoid it would be to go to the post by some way other than via Twitter or you feed reader.
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Yeah, it’s just a way for the site to ID where the link came from. In your stats, you can see how many visitors came from google reader – that’s what tells you that number. You can fairly easily “shorten” the link without trying to figure out where to delete from (as suggested above, which is what I do), by clicking on the link from your google reader (thus getting the long link), then in the webpage itself, click on the title of the blog post. That will usually refresh the page with the shorter URL. (This only works if the blog title is clickable from the blog entry, which is quite often the case.)
You can also just copy/paste the whole long link and use that – it will also take your readers to the site. 🙂
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No, that’s the problem. The long link doesn’t actually link anywhere. At least, WP blogs don’t recognize is at a legitimate link. Neither did Blogger.
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Hmmm – it works for me. (I’m really sorry when I say that – it was a running joke in my house whenever anyone was having technical computer problems, my dad, who is a computer genius and professional computer guy would come over, and it would work for him first time, doing exactly what we had been doing for hours, and he would say “well, I don’t know… works for me.” – super aggravating at times… touch of the computer nerd)
But little story aside, it’s strange – when I clicked on the long link, it took me to the same page as the short link just now from your blog, and it always has worked for me. Maybe it’s the webbrowser you’re using? (I’m grasping at straws here and making vaguely educated guesses). I’m a firefox user – maybe it’s something about the protocol of how the browser recognizes URLs?
I usually just go with the thing Pika suggests above: just delete everything after the first “.html” – and if you are anything like me, and constantly observing/looking for patterns, doing this small deletion might increase your understanding of how web addresses work, too (all the code after the .html has meanings :)) – so it has the added bonus of learning something vaguely useless but mildly interesting.
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Thank you for the award, by the way. 🙂 I’m writing a post about it but it takes time.
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🙂 You’re welcome 🙂 I enjoy your blog – I always learn new interesting things from it that would be totally off my radar otherwise. Hallmark of a good thing to read. And yes, I understand just how much time those take – you’ll notice that about 3.5 months elapsed between the first blog award and when I wrote about it…
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Mine is the shorter version, on Google Reader.
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Hah! Now I really wonder what this depends on.
Thank you for telling me, Claire.
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Mine shows up as the short version too.
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