Please have Shortlinks for Volume/Series Pages

Aruseus493

Totally a QoL thing that affects probably only me.
Ran into a problem updating the calendar on the /r/LightNovels subreddit sidebar. I hit the character limit. After a lot of adjusting and trimming down any little bit of excess I could, I got it down to 10220/10240. Part of the reason that the character limit ends up so bloated is that the publisher pages tend to have super long URLs for the volumes of series.

General Link Lengths:

June Releases:

Yen Press - (9/28)
J-Novel Club - (12/28)
Seven Seas - (4/28)
Vertical - (1/28)
Bookwalker - (1/28)
One Peace Books - (1/28)

So yea, J-Novel Club has a lot of great releases every month and all that. But it would be nice if I could get some short-links so I can share the volume links in the sidebar a bit easier. ;) Reddit uses https://redd.it/8s2r7h kind of links for their shortlinks. So it'd be nice if J-NC did something similar that way nothing gets left off the calendar. ^_^

Terabyte

As a last resort I guess you could always shorten them yourself with a 3rd party service like bit.ly or something.

LegitPancake

@terabyte or goo.gl

Terabyte

@legitpancake said in Please have Shortlinks for Volume/Series Pages:

@terabyte or goo.gl

The service is being discontinued so it's best to not use it anymore at this point. There's also a message on the page itself:

Starting March 30, 2018, we will be turning down support for goo.gl URL shortener. From April 13, 2018 only existing users will be able to create short links on the goo.gl console. You will be able to view your analytics data and download your short link information in csv format for up to one year, until March 30, 2019, when we will discontinue goo.gl. Previously created links will continue to redirect to their intended destination. Please see this blog post for more details.

Sam Pinansky

@aruseus493 Hmm, I'll look into some kind of short link plugin for React Router. Might be pretty easy to just plug in?

_08

@sam-pinansky With the use case and example (https://redd.it/8s2r7hyoutotallydontwanttospellthatout) given by OP, simply throwing link in bitly or tinyurl will suffice. It's pretty hard to come up with a situation where JNC link of that kind will be preferable to an external one.
If you want something more useful than that you can make links like j-novel.club/lazy/ j-novel.club/notmaou/3 j-novel.club/smartphone/9/7 etc but it obviously won't be as simple as adding a plugin (and I'm still not sure if anyone needs that).

Sam Pinansky

@_08 I was thinking of adding an internal route shortener routine where going to j-novel.club/short/XXXXXXX would then trigger a reverse hash on the XXXXXXX on the client that redirects to the full url. And then add a corresponding short link icon say, maybe on the footer of each page?

_08

@sam-pinansky I'm just saying that non-mnemonic short links don't seem very useful (but maybe i'm doing the internet wrong) and I'm not sure why would you spend time on that instead of fixing/removing "prepub expires" info, fixing CSS or whatever, other, minor issues you have.

Sam Pinansky

@_08 Because all those things you linked are either metadata issues or bugs that will be hard to reproduce or larger structural issues.
Doing something like this would actually be straightforward and wouldn't interact with much anything else on the site.

Generally feature requests that I can implement that won't affect anything else are the easiest and quickest to do, while most of the remaining problems are somewhat tied into the structure of the code or the site.

Also, a non-trivial amount of our sales come from that reddit sidebar.

Guspaz

To minimize it as much as possible without requiring any additional metadata, something like this:

https://j-novel.club/s/{titleShort}

The titleShort attribute is already recognizable to humans, and you already have it in your database. For example, instead of the titleSlug of "lazy-dungeon-master", you've got "LDM". Instead of "the-magic-in-this-other-world-is-too-far-behind" you've got "isekaimahou"

I see that some of the titleShort values that you've assigned have non-alphanumeric characters (you've got "meagenius?" for example), but they seem to be the exception rather than the rule, so either you just accept that those rare exceptions get entity encoded ("meagenius%3F") or you support matching them against a filtered version of titleShort ("meagenius").

By using the titleShort instead of some sort of hash or ID, you get something that people can remember while actually being short.

Sam Pinansky

@guspaz titleshort isn't guaranteed to be unique though, and that's only work for series, not volumes.