disparate.info

As you’ve likely noticed throughout my posts, links are usually in the form of http://bit.ly/xxxxx or http://disparate.info/xxx. These “short” URLs were popularized by Twitter (http://twitter.com) due to its length limitation, but are also extremely useful for tracking what topics my readers find most interesting and which source material my readers are interested in (trust). By using the bit.ly service (http://bit.ly) along with a self-hosted URL shortener, I am better able to tailor my content to readers’ interests.

That being said, I understand that some readers may be concerned that the short URL will lead to a malicious page. For those readers, I first encourage you to review the “Code of Conduct” portion of bit.ly’s Terms of Service, as well as my privacy policy. If you are still concerned, I recommend installing Mozilla’s Firefox browser and the bit.ly preview plugin. Please note that the bit.ly preview plugin will not reveal full URLs for links shortened here at my domain (those in the form http://disparate.info/xxx), however Google, as part of its crawling process, does scan this site for malicious content on a regular basis. The results of Google’s latest Safe Browsing diagnostic can be found at http://safebrowsing.clients.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?client=Firefox&hl=en-US&site=http://disparate.info.

As always, you can also send me your concerns by visiting the contact page.