{"id":339,"date":"2014-01-18T21:04:12","date_gmt":"2014-01-19T05:04:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/?p=339"},"modified":"2014-01-18T21:04:12","modified_gmt":"2014-01-19T05:04:12","slug":"a-quirk-of-twitter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/2014\/01\/18\/a-quirk-of-twitter\/","title":{"rendered":"A Quirk of Twitter"},"content":{"rendered":"

Let’s suppose for whatever reason I wanted to list my favorite TV stations, and I came up with this list:<\/p>\n

cnn.com abc.com cbs.com nbc.com amc.com hbo.com fox.com<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s not a long list — in fact, including spaces, it’s only 55 characters. Twitter’s character limit is 140 characters, so I should easily be able to tweet this, right? Wrong.
\n\"twit\"<\/a>
\nWait, what? I’m not just over the character limit, I’m WAY<\/strong> over it. How is that possible?<\/p>\n

Well, it turns out this is a quirk of Twitter’s URL shortening code. Yes, if you have a long link like http:\/\/crosswordnexus.com\/wiki\/index.php?regex=*twit*&searchtype=simple&xmode=on&source=Wiki+%2B+Wiktionary&first=1<\/a> it will shorten it. But if you have a very short URL, it will actually lengthen<\/strong> it, sometimes by quite a bit. For instance, if I type “xkcd.com” into Twitter, it gets automatically changed to http:\/\/t.co\/W1tPuAhAak, which is 22 characters long. In other words, an eight-character string almost triples in length when you type it in. Crazy, huh?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Let’s suppose for whatever reason I wanted to list my favorite TV stations, and I came up with this list: cnn.com abc.com cbs.com nbc.com amc.com hbo.com fox.com It’s not a long list — in fact, including spaces, it’s only 55 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=339"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":342,"href":"https:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339\/revisions\/342"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}