Joshua Schachter

There are lots of good reasons that go beyond content caching (which is the topic of the article).

Somewhat terse write-up here:
http://joshua.schachter.org/2008/01/proxy.html

The basic idea is that there's fair bit of useful logic that can be handled by a simpler, lighter-weight, more easily securable front-end system than the lumbering tank that is your app server. This includes basic load balancing/failover, partitioning (requests of type foo go to these servers, all the low-latency ajax stuff over there, static content somewhere else), babysitting slow clients, blackholing malformed requests, etc.

See current DiggBar scandal. These shorteners put a middleman in between your links and your content, allowing them to, at any point they like, do whatever they want, including sending all those links to themselves, to a competitor, to a landing page strewn with ads with your content framed inside, whatever. As much as we all love middlemen in other industries, seems like a great idea to let them in here, doesn't it?

Joshua Schachter wrote the definitive anti-shortener argument:

http://joshua.schachter.org/2009/04/on-url-shorteners.html

auto increment considered harmful, from joshu:

http://joshua.schachter.org/2007/01/autoincrement.html

Your tables almost always have a better unique key to use as a primary key other than auto increment (which sorts your table by the order they were inserted in - almost always useless outside of a blog).

Getting out of the habit of beginning the design of your tables with ID int autoincrement is a good thing. Even better if web frameworks stopped depending on it and setting it as the default primary key and ID used in views/routes.

Critical article from Apr 2009:

on url shorteners -- joshua schachter's blog http://joshua.schachter.org/2009/04/on-url-shorteners

Print publishers might have a case for URL shorteners but they should own and maintain their own instead of a 3rd party service they can’t control or prevent from disappearing.

Plenty of articles in the Communications of the ACM magazine use 3rd party shortened URLs and it’s unacceptable. They should know better and should host their own link shortener via their digital library system.