Quick post to talk about some of the “sausage making” behind Pro Racquetball Stats. The site generates very long URLs to call reports, which is good and bad. Its good in that I can cut and paste URLs directly to data, which I couldn’t do for years, and you can “edit” the URLs to quickly pull up a different report without going back to the selection page, but bad in that the URLs are long, complicated and often get truncated or cut off when cutting and pasting in posts.
Earlier this year, Wayne Saucier (who designed the UI/UX updates to the site and who figured out we could even do the URL posting in the first place) had a great suggestion; register a “short URL” service and utilize it for these direct links into the system instead of the longer URLs i’ve been using. As it turned out, “rball.pro” was available so we grabbed it. Wayne then built a short-URL generation service for the rball.pro domain.
I’d like to announce the first implementation release of this service officially. Now, instead of using a URL like this:
…. we can shorten it to just this:
And both URLs take you to the same report.
I’ve been incorporating these short URLs into posts for a few weeks now; i just wanted to make an official announcement and recognize Wayne’s efforts.
Furthermore, we could eventually use rball.pro for non ProRacquetballStats.com URLs too; for example, here’s a rball.pro link that goes to the very long r2sports.com URL for the Lewis Drug singles pro bracket: http://rball.pro/D344CC . Just like other “short URL” services (bit.lybeing the most popular), anything can be shortened through Wayne’s code.
In fact, we hope other Rball associations may like this service and make use of it themselves in the future.
We hope this makes reading PRS posts and navigating our content a little easier going forward. Eventually we will incorporate rball.pro throughout the site more completely as a service.
Thanks to Wayne for the idea and the work on this!