0x.co
… gets light usage …
It's actually reassuring to know that one can it in the code (comments) knowing that the service provider doesn't do anything dodgy and that the links are reasonably long-lived (as a matter of fact, Github is not discontinuing already existing URLs).
GP is not complaining about a GitHub specific url shortener.
They are saying that GitHub has had a long interest in people thinking that Git is something you only do with GitHub, reducing people from thinking about using Git without GitHub. Of course, to be clear, Git is a 100% independent project that existed before GitHub and GitHub has ZERO claim to anything about Git, it just uses it.
Git ≠ GitHub; claiming the git.io domain and then using it exclusively for GitHub URLs is distasteful.
They used to have a nice thank you page, but they got rid of it when they rolled out their bug bounty program.
I wonder if this means git.io short links will be going away, I still use mine on my CV and elsewhere.
From the announcement:
> Existing URLs will continue to be accessible
That's like Google saying "G Suite Legacy will continue to be free..."
“.. but we encourage using one of the many URL shortening services that are available, instead of git.io, as we will be deprecating the tool in the future.”
https://github.blog/2011-11-10-git-io-github-url-shortener/
It seems like it was built by some Github employees back during the URL shortening phase as just a fun hack project to learn a new database, although a few services implemented it to shorten Github URLs.
Get with the narrative!
It was a URL-shortening service for GitHub URLs. Nothing more, nothing less. You would put in a URL, and get a new, short URL git.io/... that would redirect to what you put in.
Specific to this service, I never personally used it, but I wonder how many project links will break when the service does finally go offline.
I ran across the issue about two weeks before this blog post:
https://twitter.com/ryancdotorg/status/1475673195654959108
https://twitter.com/ryancdotorg/status/1475859899099746308
Basically, bad actors were setting up open javascript redirects on github pages, then using git.io to redirect to arbitrary target URLs.
