Handy short links for all PainScience.com articles

• Oct 1, 2020 • by Paul Ingraham

Weekly nuggets of pain science news and insight, usually 100-300 words, with the occasional longer post. The blog is the “director’s commentary” on the core content of PainScience.com: a library of major articles and books about common painful problems and popular treatments. See the blog archives or updates for the whole site.

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.