John McIntyre, whom James Wolcott called "the Dave Brubeck of the art and craft of copy editing," writes on language, editing, journalism, and random topics. Identifying his errors relieves him of the burden of omniscience. Write to jemcintyre@gmail.com, befriend at Facebook, or follow at Twitter: @johnemcintyre. His original "You Don't Say" blog at The Baltimore Sun ran from 2005 to 2021, and posts on it can sometimes be found at baltimoresun.com through Google searches.
Monday, May 25, 2009
A free book
Proceed with all deliberate speed to The Lexicographer’s Rules, the blog where Grant Barrett is making available an electronic version of his book, The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English, at no cost.
Sounds interesting. Why hide the link by using tinyurl.com, though? Because it's on your page, I'm pretty sure it's not a link to a spam or phishing site.
So, maybe you didn't use a clear and transparent URL because, for some reason, you don't want to give The Lexicographer's Rules a 'proper' link, one that might give it a teeny-weeny bit of PageRank. (Do they still call it that? Who ever cared about that anyway?)
If you have to use tinyurl.com for links (and let's hope that site never goes down, otherwise the blogosphere, and Twitter especially, will go into meltdown), you might like to remember that nervous surfers like me prefer a bit of warning: change those short links to http://preview.tinyurl.com/???? instead and we'll all be happy bunnies.
Sounds interesting. Why hide the link by using tinyurl.com, though? Because it's on your page, I'm pretty sure it's not a link to a spam or phishing site.
ReplyDeleteSo, maybe you didn't use a clear and transparent URL because, for some reason, you don't want to give The Lexicographer's Rules a 'proper' link, one that might give it a teeny-weeny bit of PageRank. (Do they still call it that? Who ever cared about that anyway?)
If you have to use tinyurl.com for links (and let's hope that site never goes down, otherwise the blogosphere, and Twitter especially, will go into meltdown), you might like to remember that nervous surfers like me prefer a bit of warning: change those short links to http://preview.tinyurl.com/???? instead and we'll all be happy bunnies.
I'm sure he did it because it's a very long url.
ReplyDelete