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Comment by aes | Hacker News Reader

Let me give you some feedback for isshort.com.

1. The landing page does not tell what the service is for and who is it for.

On the first look, it looks like just another URL shortener - but why would I use it over something like 3.ly or j.mp?

2. I tried to read the explanation but bored out. I don't care what "healthy link shortening" is or what rev="canonical" does. The blog post is longwinded and filled with jargon and terms I don't understand. "Publisher"? Am I a "publisher"? Do I want to be? What is the target audience? Am I in the target audience? It's difficult to find out.

3. I put in "google.com" and out comes INVALID_URI.

4. Not having a "Submit" button feels somehow awkward. I'm not sure what I should do in order to shorten the URL. I eventually discovered that pressing Enter and clicking on the "isn't short" text works, but I'd feel better with a "Submit" button.

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Amen to all of that. I didn't know until I tried it with an unsupported host that it would turn around and provide a j.mp short URL, which is great, but non-obvious. Until then, I'm wondering why I'd want to use a link shortener with a seven-letter TLD.

It's a serious mistake to disallow shortening TLDs like "google.com", because that's what people are likely to type in to test the service. It's deadly to ever let a user see a hostile, wholly uninformative error message like "INVALID_URI".

Owing to unnecessary ajax and a submit button which doesn't reflect presses, if I fail with google.com and then try yahoo.com, there's no indication that the site has received or acted on my second attempt.

Labeling your only button with an image, in an oddball font, using text that's both passive voice and a negative statement, is not OK, as you implicitly acknowledge in the introductory blog post, when you have to tell your potential users which piece of screen real-estate to click.

I knew what rev=canonical and friends were, and even I didn't have any idea what the phrase "healthy link shortening" meant to you. I thought it might have been a point about not relying on the Libyan government. The introductory blog post isn't doing its job. The list of sites with their own shorteners should be on the front page, and should be longer — that's how you connect the site's value with potential users.

The service itself is useful, though I'd most like to see it incorporated into Twitter clients like Hibari, which use bit.ly for everything. Evangelizing an API is harder. Good luck.

Yeah, the API is the product. The website is a demo.

I will work on explaining this a bit better.

Thanks for #1 and #2. I'll reconsider my approach. I didn't know that was confusing.

3. Thanks again. I wasn't aware of that. It's bit.;y's error message, not mine.

4. I will implement a submit button soon.

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