microblog
Handy short links for all PainScience.com articles
Paul Ingraham • ARCHIVEDMicroblog posts are archived and rarely updated. In contrast, most long-form articles on PainScience.com are updated regularly over the years (see updates page).
Every featured article on PainScience.com now has a link icon on the edge of the window, to the right of the title:
Tap/click to popup information about how to link to that page. (Ironically, no link icon for blog posts like this one… yet.)
Short links are the interesting new thing here: simple, clear page addresses that are useful in many contexts where using the full address is too awkward.
Unspeakable links!
The canonical address for most pages is a bit of a mouthful. For example, the canonical URL (universal resource location) for the Epsom salts page:
https://www.painscience.com/articles/epsom-salts.php
So many slashes! Dot this, dot that! “Ain’t nobody got time for that.”
It's literally hard to say, which is a problem if I want to tell someone where to find that article during a conversation or podcast interview. It would be great if I could just say “Go to PainScience.com, slash, ‘epsom’!” And I can do that, because this short link redirects to the main URL:
PainScience.com/epsom
There are now 1-5 short links for every article. For instance, these all also work:
PainScience.com/epsom_salts
PainScience.com/epsom_baths
PainScience.com/epsom_absorption
PainScience.com/transdermal_magnesium
What are short links good for?
There are several contexts where short links are handy:
- E-mail and text messaging.
- Verbal and audio. Great for podcasters plugging my work!
- Social media posts, especially Facebook comments and Instagram captions (where links are not replaced by previews).
- Memes, presentation slides, screenshots.
The link sprinklers
Presumably no one will ever be as passionate about promoting PainScience as I am, but I’ve been amazed by the phenomenon of the link sprinklers: friends of the site who spread links to my content around the internet like myth-busting fairy dust, especially in Facebook debates/arguments. It seems like they could really work with these short links.
I don’t know how much people will actually use the short links, but I do know this: they definitely can’t use them if I don’t make them available. I often need short links myself, to promote PainScience.com content more effectively; and if I need them, then so does anyone else who ever wants to promote my articles. 🤯 It took me a few years to realize that; I am not a fast learner.
If you find these useful — or you see a way to make them more useful to you — please let me know.
