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How to make item url shorter? Article progress: Early Draft

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Why are slice IDs and item IDs so long?
Would it be possible to make them shorter?

The 32-digits hexadecimal IDs are quite standard in MySQL/PHP - see uniqid() and md5() functions. These identifiers are intended to be unique worldwide so that each item has an unique ID regardless of where it is stored, such as on Econnect's server or on Colnodo's. This feature helps us in cross-server feeding.

Internally (within the database) the IDs are stored as 16-character strings (for disk-space savings and a little better performance of the database), but this is only important for developers.

Because of long URLs, I made short_id in v1.8 - so that the auto-incremented short IDs are used by default. The URL for an item is now, for example:

http://kalendar.ecn.cz/index.shtml?AA_SL_Session=44ca275c691 842965745f90ab9aee24e&x=27968

or, even better:

http://kalendar.ecn.cz/index.shtml?x=27968

Last Edit: Aug 17 2011

<aafaq id=1765> ~ToDo: 1765 How to make item url shorter? </aafaq> 

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