On URLs

People don’t pay any attention to URLs. Recently, a highly intelligent friend of mine inadverently posted the following link on Facebook: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/get-involved/how-rich-am-i/?country=NLD&income=56000&adults=1&children=0

URLs are the building blocks of the world wide web. When a website changes its URLs, you get those nasty 404 errors. It would be good if website maintainers paid a little more attention to that.

As a website user, when you’re sharing a URL, look at it briefly. Does it actually contain the information you want it to contain? Can other people view this URL? Pro tip: use incognito mode to find out. Does it include superfluous information you were not intending to share? E.g. when searching google, you can easily end up with URLs such as https://www.google.com/search?q=previous+search#q=current+search

Keep URLs simple & working. Look at them briefly when sharing. It’s no rocket science.