Changes to Thimble URLs: goodbye naming conflicts, hello bit.ly


Creating web pages in Thimble? You may notice some changes to your Thimble links.

What’s different?

Your Thimble URLs now have an extra bit in the middle: a unique identifier made up of random letters. So for example, in the past your URL might have looked like this:

Why did we do this?

To prevent naming conflicts. Previously, the lack of any project identifier meant you could only ever create one page with a specific title.
Say, for example, you needed two pages with the title “my projects” or “test.” Or maybe you made a page called “School project” a year ago, and now you want to make a new one with that same title. Before, you couldn’t do that, because the URLs would have confllicted. Now you can.
We’ve basically taken the same strategy we were already using for Popcorn and applied it to Thimble. And following the same convention as sites like Twitter, Medium and You Tube.

Coming soon: shorter, shinier links with bit.ly

We know these URLs are longer, and maybe a little harder to share. That’s why we’re working on bit.ly URL shortening next, so that you can publish your page and get a super short URL for sharing.
The new short URLs will use “mzl.la,” and look like http://mzl.la/shortcode — so that everyone can see your URL is special, and spread some Mozilla pride. :)
We’re also working on fixing up Thimble sharing for Twitter. If you have underscores or spaces in your Webmaker account name, you may have noticed problems when you try to Tweet about your makes. This problem has to do with how Twitter parses URLs. Luckily, this issue will disappear once we get bit.ly integrated, so we should have a fix coming for you soon!

Questions or comments?

1 response

  1. Forrest O. wrote on :

    I was a fan of the “real” URLs, they made makes.org feel like a real web space. Conflicts could have been solved by only putting the random characters on the URL when there was a conflict.
    URL shorteners make it impossible to know what you’re clicking on (other than something “mzlla”).
    So, two meh votes.