link shortening
okay. let me tell you one of my pet peeves. it’s when you send a link to something and the link takes up a full paragraph. amazon is especially egregious with this; as an example, i’m going to use the sweet essentials goat milk & honey perfume. here’s the link i get if i just copy/paste it:
do you see this shit? that link is longer than my introduction paragraph. and most of it is totally unnecessary and just gives amazon tracking data. so i’m going to quick breakdown the link:
https://www.amazon.com/ is the domain. this tells your browser to go to the internet, to amazon’s address. can’t do without.
Goat-Honey-Fragrance-Perfume-Organic/dp/B07D5N4XRP/ is the sort of directory. this is where the meat of the link is; it gives the browser the information of where in the amazon domain it should look for what you’re looking for. sort of like when you ask a librarian where a book is and they say “it’s in this area of the library, i can show you if you like”
every single thing after that is optional. most, if not all, of it is just tracking data that tells amazon who looked it up, how, where they found it, etc. etc. and you can totally safely remove it.
so, our final, shortened link is:
https://www.amazon.com/Goat-Honey-Fragrance-Perfume-Organic/dp/B07D5N4XRP/
and you can test it for yourself, both the really long link and this nice clipped link lead to the same page. this is generally applicable to most websites; if a link feels a little too long, experiment and start removing bits off the end. generally anything that shows up after “?[text]=” is probably safe to remove, as with “&[text]=”. sometimes those have particular jobs, though; for example, youtube links with a particular timestamp will include “&t=[number]s” and while removing this will keep the link to the video, it will remove the timestamp. similarly, youtube sometimes uses “&v=[text]” to encode the id of a video, so without that you’re left with just the youtube homepage. if a link has “?si=[text]”, that’s all safe to remove, because that’s pure tracking data.
in short: clip your links. don’t give them any more than you need to. experiment a little. have fun and be yourself. i love you