This 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.
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
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 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.
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.
Your comment adds literally nothing to this discussion. You can't form an opinion on the topic discussed because of your opinion on someones politics. Great, don't comment.
Government subsidized groceries seems like something that was already solved by food stamps. Having the government run entire grocery stores at a loss seems like a worse implementation of the same thing.
I guess it's nice for the voters who are too rich to qualify for food stamps, but in that case it would have been equivalent and simpler to just make the food stamps more universal (remove means testing).
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.
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.
Functions exactly like tinyurl, generally used by public officers for the various programmes/initiatives from the ministries and agencies.
not sure why they have never done that before
hopefully this stuff gets pushed out via email too? not enough open protocols to receive pushes from otherwise
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.
[1] https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI
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.
I guess it's nice for the voters who are too rich to qualify for food stamps, but in that case it would have been equivalent and simpler to just make the food stamps more universal (remove means testing).
If you really want something different to food stamps, India's subsidized canteens seem like a much more interesting idea: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/inside-indias...
big tech has long canceled url on phones.
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.