Zohran and the Short Link
iamwillwang.comThis makes a lot of sense if public participation is actually desired. Links need to be short, snappy, and memorable so they're easy to either type into a smartphone on the spot or be recalled at some point later when one has a spare moment. This kind of link is also more likely to spread via word of mouth.
Traditional link shorteners only meet one of those requirements. Random strings aren't going to be remembered and the chances that they'll be mistyped is substantially higher.
At least some traditional link shorterners let you choose the string.
Until they inevitably get acquired and all the links eventually break. Please don't use 3rd party link shorteners, host your own if you REALLY have to.
This is similar to Singapore’s https://go.gov.sg links.
Functions exactly like tinyurl, generally used by public officers for the various programmes/initiatives from the ministries and agencies.
it would be nice if they added a link preview
not sure why they have never done that before
What format would people generally prefer for shorturls if they were designing a website for readability, maintenance, and SEO?
foo.website.com/{initiative} or website.com/foo/{initiative}? And are there any optimal names for foo that also make the scheme more intelligible to the average person?
> foo.website.com/{initiative} or website.com/foo/{initiative}? And are there any optimal names for foo that also make the scheme more intelligible to the average person?
Is "foo" part of "website" or is "foo" separate from other similar organizations? Subdomains you'd use maybe for a different department, but if it's the same department, prefer paths.
Basically signals how connected it'd be to the main org.
But all this is basically feelings and "common sense" rather than anything strictly specified. You'd be able to make use of foo.website.com as well as you'll be able to use website.com/foo in practice, very minutia detail.
People are discovering go links from first principles.
The meta on this post is that the minimalist blog design by iamwillwang.com is itself really cool. Great work!
Left NYC around when he got elected (non political, just a job offer) Does he market by his first name now?
It seems overly familiar and parasocial to use it in titles if not
Politicians have been doing this for a while now. I think the idea is to project more of a 'one of us' vibe and not stand on formality, which creates a vibe of being part of a separate class.
I'm not a huge fan of Zohran, but man, I will admit that it is so refreshing to have a leader that isn't senile and is actually in touch.
Genuine question, what is it you don't like about Mamdani? I don't live in NYC, so I don't have first-hand experience with him, but I've not seen many complaints about him (other than things like "he broke the dress code at the swimming pool that one time", which is "Obama's tan suit" levels of petty)
His policies are socialist. Some of us still perceive that as a bad thing.
I mean, as far as I'm aware, "socialism" just means that the means of production are owned socially, instead of privately. But is there anything that he's actually done that is disagreeable, or is it just that many news outlets are saying "socialism = bad, Mamdani is socialist, therefore Mamdani = bad"?
You can omit the first part, being neutral towards a controversial figure is okay!
Just admit you’re a fan. No shame in that.
Mamdani+ his team are genius at PR
In an age where cameras are everywhere, all one has to do for good PR is good.
Only if you own the camera system, otherwise they won't publish the video of you doing good
Which is why another Democratic mayor in another blue city, who Mamdani considers “the most effective Democrat in office”, someone who inspires him - nobody knows that politicians name unless they’re really into politics. I’ll admit, even I’ve only heard of her because Mamdani name checked her.
Mamdani’s every tiny initiative gets tonnes of PR because Mamdani and his team are masters of media. That’s what sets him apart from Michelle Wu or anyone else.
It's an url shortener. I implemented 3 of these this year and nobody is calling me a genius.
Because a genius would have only needed to implement a single one this year
3 different clients.
You’re making the usual HN mistake of focusing on the technical aspects
I did the non-technical aspects too and yet I'm somehow still just a shmuck doing his job while these guys are geniuses.
You literally only said you made a link shortener, and even now give no indication you understand what aspects of the Mamdani communication strategy are being praised.
Bro, your handle is hackernud3s.
Given how untrustworthy the most popular social media providers have proven to be, it's madness that so many politicians and government accounts still use things like Xitter or facebook as their primary communication medium.
Even ignoring the political misinformation that is rampant on these platforms and often promoted widely by the platform because it is inflammatory and gets lots of engagement, they also severely punish posts that link away from the site, which public safety and government accounts obviously need to do. It's a hazard for public safety info to be targeted primarily at a feed designed to bury it. Even if you're following those accounts on Xitter or facebook, they're effectively never going to show you their posts.
As I understand it, Bsky doesn't punish posts for including a link off-site, and doesn't require you to be logged in to view it. Whether they'll continue to behave in a responsible way forever remains to be seen, I guess.
The great thing about Bsky is that feeds can be user-run (and the for you feed is a great success story). So if Bluesky Inc. wants to derank links on their discover feed, there are a lot of user driven feed options to counteract that
The question is do you trust a healthy user-empowering ecosystem will form around a VC-fueled corporation that controls 97+% of the bluesky network? https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/
NYC could also pipe their own PDS right into NYC mobile apps, email notifications, etc. in this context.
A little sad that it's often posting screenshots of X posts there. At least the screenshot has alt text, but if you're doing alt text, why a screenshot in the first place?
Is that a screenshot from twitter? I can't open twitter but I think a lot of times they do this screenshot of text thing because it gets more engagement. It's popular on facebook and instagram too where celebrities love to screenshot their notes app
What makes you think it’s a screenshot from X (formerly Twitter)?
This is what happens when Boomer politicians are finally kicked to the curb.
bbc.co.uk/thing is the standard for URLs used like this at the BBC, and it works great there too. The ubiquity of BBC URLs on audio/video in the UK helps.
Here's what it was like beforehand. Laughable! https://youtu.be/MEN8KvEuYhE?t=54
Imho they should def be using a separately managed go.nyc.gov or link.nyc.gov DNS record
But I appreciate the intent..!
What's the upside of this? Seems like it would only make links longer and more annoying to type in, when the intention is to make civic participation easier.
I’m genuinely curious: why should it be on a separately managed DNS record?
There wouldn't be any benefit to it. They're not accepting user-submitted content. I doubt anyone working for the NYC would upload CP and share a link to it.
this is how the government should communicate with its people - push out via all social media channels but always link back to something everyone can access!
hopefully this stuff gets pushed out via email too? not enough open protocols to receive pushes from otherwise
What if I told you there’s an existing protocol for doing Really Simple Syndication?
Sorry, we're on the wrong timeline. The worse one, in fact.
I like click to cancel. Should have a year at least in url
> click-to-cancel combat-antisemitism EndStreetHarassment jingle knicks knicksgame3 rental-ripoff Summer
I'd like to believe that the diversity, equity, and inclusion of Scheme, Pascal, and C stdlib naming conventions here is intentional.
I put a short link on a family thing and someone complained it didn't work. Turns out iOS OCR recognised a "-" as a "=", so this isn't just people typing it wrong.
Now my short links implement case insensitivity and striping all non alphanumeric characters, i.e. a "-" is optional and any other symbol character is also stripped.
nyc.gov seems to do case insensitivity but doesn't strip "-", so you do need the "-".
> "click-to-cancel combat-antisemitism EndStreetHarassment jingle knicks knicksgame3 rental-ripoff Summer"
We didn't start the fire!
Flame wars. City council will soon debate two vs four spaces between traffic cones.
I will not stand and watch tabs getting discriminated!
Typical, all this DEI naming, promoting minority formats no one uses, while they refuse to recognize the majority are perfectly happy with camelCase!
(/s in case it is needed)
The problem with these short pithy urls is that their lifetime is limited - there's only so many initiative names and they're going to collide and be removed and replaced.
Cool uris don't change[1]. Short, readable uris are great but they should be merely redirecs, and the mapping should be version controlled and exposed to the public as an immutable history.
The public doesn't need an immutable history of URLs, they need URLs they can freaking type. When you've got pages people actually care to go to, then you can create your museum of URLs.
The internet isn't an append-only archive. It changes quite frequently in fact. Sorry dawg.
Luckily these are merely redirects!
Brings to mind this: https://x.com/NYCMayor/status/1971618033115550180
The lifetime of the programs they link to is also limited. There's no earthly reason, when running a website in 2026, to care what Tim Berners-Lee thought about the aesthetics and purposes of URLs in 1998. It's a nice nostalgia session, but "cool urls don't change" is ironically short-sighted and has lead to well-meaning dolts embedding GUIDs and other such constructs into them. The entire concept was posited prior to the advent of on-screen phone keyboards, which make typing long heavily-punctuated urls a pain in the ass. There are a thousand reasons to salute this document and let it recede into the mists of time.
A municipal website should be useful to the citizens who want to use it. This is a great example of doing something useful with the web.
In this day and age it makes sense to amend Tim's statement to "canonical urls don't change". And cool web sites have a canonical URL for most pages.
That way we a) don't lose track of relevant content but b) can have nice things such as short URLs with good names.
Easily solved by adding an interstitial whenever a URI becomes replaced and is therefore no longer immutable, and showing the history of what it used to point to as well (in case you're coming along from an old link). By default, after 5 seconds, it could redirect to the current destination.
does it matter?
big tech has long canceled url on phones.
I can type a URL on today's iPhone just fine.
This seems so amateur hour. The way the links work in this post are broken on mobile, and the first one I managed to make work was full of trivial grammatical errors.
Works on my machine. Didn't see any grammar errors.