Snippet #746

Pet peeve: people who use URL shortening services when there is no need to do so. URL shorteners have their place for twitter posts, which are limited to 140 characters, but everywhere else they suck; using them means entrusting your link to a potentially brittle third-party service which offers no guarantees of permanence, and you also prevent your visitors from mousing over the link in order to see what their final destination will be.