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I had a comment from ![[twitter.com profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/e0caa790ec10/-/twitter.com/favicon.ico)
skington yesterday, asking why people still used link shorteners now that Twitter allows you to put in full length URLs.
So today, as my feet are too painful to walk more than 5 minutes in any direction, I set about removing link shortening from my tweets*.
Now, my links start life on Delicious, are picked up from there by If This Then That, which punts them over to Buffer. The reason for this is that IFTTT does automated picking up of data from various sites, and Buffer makes sure that my links are spread out, so that people on Twitter don't get hit by 20-odd tweets at once, when I clear out a bunch of tabs.
It _should_ be as simple as changing my settings on both sites. Sadly, life was not that simple. I turned off link-shortening on IFTTT, and discovered that Buffer insists on shortening things for you too. So I looked up the (unintuitive) method of getting Buffer to not do that, and found that it was still happening. And, of course, neither system provides me with decent logs to tell what's actually going on.
So I went back to IFTTT and removed my bitly account from it entirely, figuring that it might still be shortening things, even with the settings turned off. And that _kinda_ did the trick, in that Buffer suddenly got a shortened version of the _text_ through instead. Which indicates that it's passing through the full URL and shortening the text to make sure only 140 characters are passed through in total.
The fact that Twitter will now shorten the link itself, removing the need for Buffer to trim the text, seems to have passed them by.
At which point I gave up entirely on the endeavour, put the settings back to where they had been, and emailed both of their support departments to tell them theysuck don't work as well as they could.
*I like knowing how many people have clicked on my links over the last month - apparently 7,740 in the last month - but I value proper URLs more.
So today, as my feet are too painful to walk more than 5 minutes in any direction, I set about removing link shortening from my tweets*.
Now, my links start life on Delicious, are picked up from there by If This Then That, which punts them over to Buffer. The reason for this is that IFTTT does automated picking up of data from various sites, and Buffer makes sure that my links are spread out, so that people on Twitter don't get hit by 20-odd tweets at once, when I clear out a bunch of tabs.
It _should_ be as simple as changing my settings on both sites. Sadly, life was not that simple. I turned off link-shortening on IFTTT, and discovered that Buffer insists on shortening things for you too. So I looked up the (unintuitive) method of getting Buffer to not do that, and found that it was still happening. And, of course, neither system provides me with decent logs to tell what's actually going on.
So I went back to IFTTT and removed my bitly account from it entirely, figuring that it might still be shortening things, even with the settings turned off. And that _kinda_ did the trick, in that Buffer suddenly got a shortened version of the _text_ through instead. Which indicates that it's passing through the full URL and shortening the text to make sure only 140 characters are passed through in total.
The fact that Twitter will now shorten the link itself, removing the need for Buffer to trim the text, seems to have passed them by.
At which point I gave up entirely on the endeavour, put the settings back to where they had been, and emailed both of their support departments to tell them they
*I like knowing how many people have clicked on my links over the last month - apparently 7,740 in the last month - but I value proper URLs more.
