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The Campaign Spot

Election-driven news and views . . . by Jim Geraghty.


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Don’t Click on the Links In the Jolt!

Well, here’s an awful start to Monday morning: apparently the links in today’s Jolt are sending people to porn sites. The version I sent along to the editors seems fine (you can see a portion in the preview post here) so there must be some issue with the link-shortener used in the editing process. (Without the link-shortener, in some e-mail programs every link URL is listed within the text and makes the Jolt hard to read with an iPhone or Blackberry or other mobile device.) While I’m not a tech guy, I suspect somebody messed with the URL shortener so that it redirects to the bad sites. The Powers That Be have been notified. A version with safe links should be coming to your e-mailboxes shortly.

Tags: I Hate Mondays

New on The Campaign Spot. . .


COMMENTS   8

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tata plum
   04/18/11 10:57

Well, it certainly was a Morning Jolt!

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   04/18/11 11:05

You just doubled your subscribers. Looks like someone's learning something from Trump's edgy pseudo-campaign.

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McGehee
   04/18/11 11:05

Kindly ignore my emails about this then.

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   04/18/11 11:22

What, I thot it was a test to see if anyone was actually reading it...

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JD522
   04/18/11 12:28

And here I was thinking it was the Best "Jolt" EVAR!

;-)

Now I'll bet you're going to claim that the word "Willy" appearing in the Captcha I just had to complete is a coincidence.

Regards,

Joe

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   04/18/11 15:50

Hmmmmm... did those links get picked up from Mr. Geraghty's browsing history?

Just kidding, of course.

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John Terry
   04/18/11 16:43
John Morris
   04/30/11 20:37

Maybe you really didn't know what the gnomes in IT were doing to your text. I take the plain text version of the Jolt and know a bit about the net. That wasn't a link shortener you were using before, it was a click through tracking service. It allowed NRO to know exactly which subscribers were clicking which links and when. To enable that the links it generated were longer, not shorter. They were so frickin' long it made it very hard to read so I hope you either stick with what you are doing now or simply embed the actual links.

If you do it RIGHT the readers of the html version will be none the wiser whatever you do. Make the anchor text short, descriptive and don't be afraid to use spaces to avoid problems on small displays. Remember, the anchor text does not have to bear any relationship the linked url; it only needs to allow a viewer to decide if they want to click.

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