Creating and editing links

The fields

Field	Required	What it is
Title	Yes	The human-readable name, shown in the index and used to sort it
Short name	Yes	The bit after the slash, such as devops
Destination	Yes	The full URL to send people to
Indexed		Whether the link works at all. See Link states
Public		Whether it appears in the published index

The list also shows each link’s usage count and when it was last updated, both maintained for you. Links are ordered by last updated, so whatever you have just touched is at the top.

Short name rules

Letters, numbers, hyphens and underscores only. Anything else is rejected when you save.

Short names are stored in lowercase whatever you type, so DevOps and devops are the same link and you cannot have both.

Choosing one

The name is the whole product as far as anyone else is concerned. Some things that help:

• Short enough to say out loud. If it needs spelling out, it is too long.
• Avoid characters that survive speech badly. Hyphens and underscores sound identical when read aloud, and nobody hears the difference between team-docs and team_docs.
• Avoid names that look like typos of other names, because the failure mode is silent: a wrong guess is an ordinary 404 rather than a helpful suggestion.

The destination

Store a complete URL, including the scheme. The service checks the destination is a usable URL at the moment somebody follows the link, and returns a 400 if it is not, so a malformed address fails for your users rather than for you at save time.

Point at something stable. The whole value of a short link is that it can be printed on something you cannot reissue, and a destination that moves every few months undoes that. Where the real URL is likely to change, point the short link at a page you control and let that page do the moving.

Editing an existing link

Any field can be changed, including the destination, and it takes effect immediately. Repointing an existing link is the intended way to handle a destination that has moved: everyone holding the short link keeps working, which is the reason to have used one.

Changing the short name is a different matter. The old name stops working the moment you save, and anyone holding it gets a 404. Treat it as retiring one link and creating another rather than as a rename.

Deleting

Deleting removes the link and its usage count outright.

Turning Indexed off is almost always better. It has the same effect for anyone following the link, keeps the row and its history, and can be reversed. See Link states.