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[Bioc-devel] WISH: BioC URL shortcut to packages

5 messages · Henrik Bengtsson, Tim Triche, Jr., Hervé Pagès +1 more

Original
Henrik Bengtsson
# 
Analogously to CRAN URL "shortcuts, e.g.

  http://cran.r-project.org/package=digest

expanding to

  http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/digest/index.html,

it would be neat if Bioconductor would support something similar, e.g.

  http://bioconductor.org/package=Biostring

expanding to

  http://bioconductor.org/packages/release/bioc/html/Biostrings.html

Here is a .htaccess RewriteRule (not tested):

  RewriteRule ^package=(.*)$ packages/release/bioc/html/$1.html [NC,L]

The main purpose is to be able to use shorter URLs in texts; the
current ones can sometimes occupy a complete line of text.

Just a suggestion/wish

Henrik
Tim Triche, Jr.
# 
Once upon a time I used apache's mod_rewrite for this sort of thing (in my case for SEO purposes). That said it's not hard at all and super useful. 

I suspect this is why Rails, Sinatra, etc use routing as their basic building block. Presumably if you typed in

http://bioconductor.org/Biostrings

It would rewrite the URL to the release version's page and that would be that.  I've heard worse ideas :-)

--t
Hervé Pagès
# 
Hi,
On 02/23/2014 03:58 AM, Sean Davis wrote:
Should we also provide a short URL like this for annotation and
experiment packages? For these packages the current permanent URL
is even longer:

 
http://bioconductor.org/packages/release/data/annotation/html/org.Hs.eg.db.html
 
http://bioconductor.org/packages/release/data/experiment/html/affydata.html
Sounds good to me. I wonder if this shouldn't actually be made the
final URL instead of an URL that redirects to the final URL. People
often copy/paste the URL that shows up in the address bar of their
browser to share it with others. So if there is a redirect, the
long URLs are more likely to be used and shared. But if there is
not, the short URLs are more likely to be used and shared.

H.