It was very simple. Blogger hosted its photos at photos1.blogger.com, 3579/104 was a personal identifier for me and tbarrier.jpg was what I'd called the image. It proved too simple.
In 2007 'New Blogger' was introduced and this introduced a longer URL.
There were still three sets of 11 characters but the fourth set was now 42 characters long.
This week Blogger have silently introduced a new way to host my images.
It's suddenly ridiculously long.
The code needed to show you yesterday's image of the Thames Barrier was
Everything is now hosted at blogger.googleusercontent.com and this is followed by a string of 185 characters.
It means every time I want to show you an image I have to embed a 229-character string into my code.
Last week it was 120 characters long.
In 2007 it was 87 characters long.
In 2006 it was 61 characters long.
What's more the URL no longer contains the name of the image, it's just a torrent of seemingly random characters. This means if I upload more than one photo to embed in a blogpost I have no direct way of knowing which code is for which image, which is a right pain if there are a lot of photos.
Blogger is a Google service, and Google have long been perfectly happy to foist ridiculously long URLs on the wider public.
For example the code for a StreetView view of the Thames Barrier is
...which thankfully they let you shorten to https://goo.gl/maps/rahDcyto3UPcRq4K8
But there's no shortened URL option for yesterday's photo of the Thames Barrier, so I'm stuck with
I genuinely don't understand why it needs to be this long.
Each character is an upper or lower case letter, a digit or a dash, which is 64 possibilities each time.
A ten character code would have 115292150606846976 possibilities, which is 1 quintillion (or 1 billion billion).
A fifty character code would have almost a googol of possibilities, which is 1 with a hundred zeroes on the end, and that's more than the number of atoms in the observable universe.
But this is a 185 character code and it has 10334 possibilities, or 1 followed by 334 zeroes, and that is overkill piled on overkill.
Developers do a lot of mucky work under the bonnet and are happy to use excessive code they know you'll never see.
They've assumed you'll never see
but I see it and it's bloody cumbersome as well as totally unhelpful.
I wish they'd managed to find a less user-unfriendly way of doing it.
On the bright side at least they should never need to lengthen it again.
