ZOIS Blog

Some time ago, in the last century, I acquired zois.com, and to be honest I never knew what to do with it — the web-site was built around a ‘.co.uk’ address. Continuing with my, as yet unpublished, experiments with mirco-blogging and social media has convinced me of the usefulness of short URLs. I can understand the point of bit.ly and its fellow travellers now. At the suggestion of a user I’m now using zois.com as a sort-of URL shortener, but only for Jobcentre Plus Mirror stuff. Under the covers Apache’s rewrite rules are employed to get to the regular, larger, home.zois.co.uk based URL. As an example:

• http://zois.com/ROI78785 will get you dancing.
• http://zois.com/ROI78785o will get you the original posting, if still available.
• http://zois.com/ROI summarizes everything in that office.

The observant amongst you will see how that works. Three letters for the office code, then a number for the job. The whole lot is effectively the standard job reference without the redundant solidus (‘/’). An optional terminal ‘o’ will get you to a representation of the original Jobseekers Direct web-site posting, which will come through ZOIS‘s caches. The guessable URL should offer an advantage over more mechanical URL shortener systems, in that it can be hand-crafted, if necessary. There’s specifically no ‘www’ in front of these URLs.

This stuff works now, experiment with it. The usual caveats and feedback exhortations apply. Kudos to Paul  Geraghty for suggesting re-writes, for I’d originally thought of hacking some clunky PHP.

Update: I’ve noted that some are leaving the redundant ‘/’ in the reference, a bit of cut’n'pastery gone awry, I think. Anyway, I’ve put some additional re-write rules to cope with that so, for example, http://zois.com/ROI/78785, works and doesn’t send you to some Not Found typo-madness. 2011-11-13.