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Does Digg just dislike Harry Potter?

I have a quick question for you, Dave: I'm trying to bookmark a Web page at The Leaky Cauldron, a Harry Potter website, and Digg refuses to work with it. Does Digg just dislike Harry Potter, or what's going on?

Dave's Answer:

That's an interesting situation indeed! I went to The Leaky Cauldron myself (it's actually a great source of Harry Potter news and trivia and I already subscribe to its RSS feed as it happens) and found an interesting article about Scholastic (the US publisher) launching a YouTube channel to help with promotion of the seventh book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

The URL for that particular page is a bit weird, though:

http://www.the-leaky-cauldron.org/#article:9713

To be honest, I've never seen "#" in a URL and surmise that it's actually an illegal URL based on the original Web specifications (the "#" should be a numeric character entity instead, as should the colon, making the URL look like %23article%3A9713).

Anyway, I tried to Digg it and you're right, here's what I got:

Digg refuses to digg bad Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows URL

Who is at fault here? Well, if we must assign fault, then I would say that The Leaky Cauldron is producing URLs that are dangerous and contain characters that aren't supposed to be "in the clear". It's a bit surprising that it works with Web browsers, truth be told.

Nonetheless, Digg could certainly modify its algorithms to be a bit more lenient with poorly formatted URLs from sites and then we could Digg stories from The Leaky Cauldron and any other site that uses a similar URL format.

My guess, however, is that you won't be able to Digg Harry Potter stories from TLC for rather a while. And I know that's something Snape would be chuckling about, don't ya think?

Help others find this article at Del.icio.us, Digg, Netscape, Reddit, and Simpy.

Categorized: Building Web site traffic (Article 7322)
Tagged: bookmarking, digg, harry potter
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Comments

# is used in URLs as an anchor to point to a specific location with in a web page. For example, a URL ending in somepage.html#comments would tell the web browser to load somepage.html and then jump the screen down to the comments section of that page.

Anyway, in the case of The Leaky Cauldron, there appear to be alternate URLs you can use that Digg might like more. In the case of the Scholastic/YouTube article, this looks like another URL for that article:
http://www.the-leaky-cauldron.org/index.php?articleID=9713

Posted by: Eilt Druin at April 17, 2007 12:01 PM

The link mentioned by Eilt is not an exact match for the URL posted, but may do for the desired purpose. If you wan tan exact match, just add 'index.php?' before the '#'.
http://www.the-leaky-cauldron.org/index.php?#article:9713

Posted by: Dustin L. at April 17, 2007 12:19 PM

As Eilt Druin points out, the # is ok. The : however, is not. You can use percent-encoding to replace it with %3A though and it works fine.

Posted by: PhoenixOr at April 17, 2007 1:07 PM

I was recently trying to locate a product, and only had one bag of their product to go on. There was no mailing address, no phone number, but only an e-mail address with the # in it, sunlight#7. I tried every variation I could find, but never could get through. So, I am going to try inserting the numeric character entity as you did above. We will see.

Posted by: Cooper Strange at April 17, 2007 6:11 PM

In a way it is good that Digg sticks to proper formating of a URL. There are so many different ways to format a URL I don't seem any benefit from having more that only have the same use.

Posted by: Dave at July 4, 2007 6:55 AM

I have a lot to say, but ...

I have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but most of all I'd like to say thank you for all your efforts on this Web site by buying you a chai!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!