I saw an engraved bit.ly URL today.

Digital permanence and me Conceptually a URL shortener is a useful idea. A shorter url is simpler to speak aloud, to paste into an email without it breaking, to add to social media and not use too many characters. In practice, URL shorteners are not permanent. They’re a single point of failure. Their functionality depends on whomever owns the domain making sure they keep working into the future. I have used several URL shorteners over the years which have GONE OUT OF BUSINESS. Going out of business is anti-permanence. About me? I am Mister Permanent Link. I read both Cool URIs don’t change and Web Pages Must Live Forever in the 1990s and hold to that. I appreciate some things have to go, or are temporary, but I like the permanent record. I have made several urls for my Flash movies from 1997 which still work and included the JavaScript library to make them work in 2026. I have archived all my tweets to his own website. Many of those tweets have links which use now-dead or ailing URL…

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