URL Shortening – Are Short URLs Permanent?

Jeff Atwood wrote that URL shortening is destroying the web. His argument is that URL shortening distorts PageRank.

The internet is the house that PageRank built, and it's all predicated on hyperlinks. Once you start making every link your special flavor of "shortened" link, framing the target content -- heck, maybe wrapping it in a few ads for good measure -- you've completely turned that system on its head.

bayimg.com is using lighthttpd to host its website. lighthttpd can be hosted both on Windows and Unix based operating systems. Typically for non Windows hosting, the case does matter. So 2 resources by 2 different URLs where only the case of the path differs could refer to 2 different resources.

Even if different case variations give you the same result, I'd not assume that they will always point to the same resource. Use the exact URL with casing that they give you.

You never know they may even have some computers hosting on Windows and others on a Unix based system. Maybe you just happen to hit one of their Windows servers via DNS load balancing.

There is mention in RFC1738 - Uniform Resource Locators (URL) that the scheme should be case insensitive (example: HTTP://), but there is no mention about the path of the URL, so don't assume 2 different cased URLs are the same, even if they happen to point to the same resource for you on your test.