John Thingstad <john.thingstad@chello.no> wrote:
+---------------
| Rob Warnock <rpw3@rpw3.org> wrote:
| > I call them "obfuscated URLs", and I use them (manually) all the time
| > for sending information to friends or (sometimes) business associates.
...
| The one problem is that they are not very search engine friedly.
+---------------

Uh... What part of "this is a private secret and I don't *WANT*
any !@^%$!#@ search engines to find it!" was not obvious?!?  ;-}

+---------------
| With Apache you can use the URL rewrite facillity to turn it into
| a directory name. Thus avoiding the ?var=symbol.
+---------------

Well, that's what another replier suggested. As for myself, I *do*
use static URLs, of the form "${recipient_name}.`random 16`", e.g.:

    http://dom.ain/.unpub/alice.KpZQsCbaj_i4V96I/
    http://dom.ain/.unpub/bob.6U3145MvqsfOw0uZ/
    http://dom.ain/.unpub/eve.l_v0TZDhN1V832Ys/
    http://dom.ain/.unpub/mallory.SoQLqlWOwUjSzgxR/

and make very, very sure that <http://dom.ain/.unpub/> has indexing
turned off [or has an explicit dummy index page] and that the the
full URL never shows up visibly on the public areas of the site.


-Rob

p.s. There's nothing magic about that format, except that my
"random" script makes sure to use only characters that are legal
in both URLs and filenames. The set [a-zA-Z0-9_@] contains 64
elements, and is thus easy to map to from /dev/urandom output.

Also, having the obfuscated URLs start with the recipient name
makes it easier for *me* to remember which directory is which
and to navigate among them with shell file-completion.  ;-}  ;-}

-----
Rob Warnock			<rpw3@rpw3.org>
627 26th Avenue			<URL:http://rpw3.org/>
San Mateo, CA 94403		(650)572-2607