If you are a diasp.org user you have seen dia.so URL’s and can shorten any URL with it inside Diaspora.
I have offered others to use it, but no one has bitten, that’s ok! I did just launch a profile shortner on the main dia.so page. Idea is to simplify connecting with others via a central hub. Since it sets a cookie with your pod name it would be a nice central hub for things, all things! If you have created something or know someone that has that “needs to know” the users pod to work properly please suggest it!
Is there a way to shorten the URL before a status is posted? That would certainly help in the character count for Twitter.
Not right now, but I fixed the js counter to again reflect proper when you use the /// method.
https://github.com/diasporg/diaspora/commit/c97bd5406d1636004ea22172411a31362df472d1
Works for me, swimmingly! Using the shortener often.
Not sure I understood about the profile shortener …
Can’t see the point of a URL shortener except:
1. If Diaspora itself has stupidly long URLs.
2. For Twitter (which surely will abolish their 160 char limit sooner or later).
Re: the latter, ideally we want to write our status updates perfectly formatted for Diaspora, FB (which means URL preview too!), G+ (if anyone cares) and Twitter.
For sake of convenience, Diaspora must count up to 160 chars. It would shorten the URL (any URL) automatically if necessary. It would also allow you to select extraneous text that would appear in Diaspora/FB but not Twitter.
In other words, the user would see both the Diaspora update and the Twitter update in the same space. A simpler alternative would have the user editing the Twitter update separately on the next few lines and the updates would be sent simultaneously.
BTW, This blog seems impossible to find when logged in. I only stumbled upon it because I was logged out. Same with the Diaspora Forum.
Agreed pretty much on all your ideas. Things are not yet in Beta, so there’s lots of time for the Diaspora team as a whole to implement those. I just really hope they do!!
I am a slightly more technical person than most so I can catch on to and work past difficulties, especially when something is already so great and still in Alpha.
But sadly the average user needs to have things dead simple and easy to talk with everyone they know, without having to ask them to sign-up for something new. And if its different from other things they’ve already used (or haven’t ever used anything ever before) You need to walk them through all the details about how to do things, slowly and step by step, or they will just be over whelmed and give up. But at the same time, there needs to be a way to tell whether a user is a more technical type and already know most things, or just wants to jump in without all the steps. Can’t wait to watch as Diaspora evolves and grows into what everyone expects and hopes Facebook to be, but never actually is.
Don’t even get me started on Google+.
Ooops, just wanted to clarify, that I don’t expect all those things David Gould mentioned to be done by the time Beta hits, just maybe done by the time things are out of Beta and are fully released. lol