Sharing, Links & Measurement
A hosted file is only useful once someone opens it, and that journey has its own vocabulary. This category covers the link itself, piece by piece — scheme, path, query string, fragment, and the percent-encoding that stops a filename with spaces from breaking everything — along with short links, QR codes, deep links, embed codes and the Open Graph cards that decide what your URL looks like when it is pasted into Slack. It also covers why a link beats an attachment once a file passes a mail provider's limit, the real difference between cloud storage, a transfer service and hosting, and how to read the numbers afterwards without claiming more precision than a cookie-free count can honestly give you.
31 terms in this category
Access Control
The rules deciding who may reach a file or page and what they may do once they are there. It combines proving identity with checking permission, and the two are separate jobs.
Bounce Rate
The share of visits that produced only one recorded event before the person left. It cannot be worked out from server logs alone — something has to be running in the visitor's browser to notice the second event or its absence.
Client Deliverable
The finished thing you hand over at the end of a piece of work — a report, a set of files, a built site, a brand pack. Handing it over well means a stable address, a clear name and a version anyone can identify.
Cloud Storage
Cloud storage keeps your files on someone else's servers and syncs them to your devices. Holding files for you is a different job from publishing one to the web.
Deep Link
A deep link points at a specific place inside something rather than its front door — a particular page, document or screen. On the web that means a full path; on mobile it can open a native app.
Digital Portfolio
A selection of your finished work published at one web address you can send to anybody. It is a place to look at what you have made, not a profile on someone else's platform.
Document Tracking
Recording what happens to a document after you send it — whether it was opened, how often, and sometimes how far it was read. The techniques run from ordinary counting to covert per-person surveillance, and the two are not the same thing.
Email Attachment Limit
An email attachment limit is the largest message, attachments included, that a mail provider will accept. Gmail caps it at 25 MB and most Outlook accounts at 20 MB, and the real ceiling for a file is lower than either figure.
Embed Code
An embed code is a snippet of HTML you paste into a page so that content hosted somewhere else appears inside it. Most embed codes are an iframe; some are a script tag.
File Transfer Service
A file transfer service takes one large file, gives you a temporary link to it, and deletes it after a set period. It moves a file to a person; it does not publish it.
iframe Embed
An iframe embed places another web page or file inside a rectangle on your page, as a separate document with its own address. It is the usual way to show a hosted PDF, map or demo in place.
Large File Transfer
Large file transfer is the business of getting a file too big for email from one person to another. In practice it means uploading it once and sending an address.
Link Preview
The general behaviour of software fetching a pasted URL and rendering a summary of it — in chat apps, messaging clients, email, note tools and feeds. A social preview card is one visible result of it.
Link Rot
Link rot is the slow decay of working links into dead ones as pages move, domains lapse and services shut down. A large share of links published a decade ago no longer resolve.
Link Sharing
Link sharing means sending someone a web address that points at your file, rather than sending a copy of the file itself. One address, one source of truth, any number of recipients.
oEmbed
An open format that lets one site turn a plain URL into a rich embed automatically. The site holding the content answers a small JSON request describing how it should be displayed.
Online Proposal
A pitch, quote or scope document published at a web address and sent as a link rather than an attachment. The client opens it in a browser; you keep the ability to correct it after sending.
Permalink
A permalink is an address meant never to change, so that everything pointing at it keeps working. The permanence is a promise from whoever owns the address, not a property of the web.
QR Code
A QR code is a square barcode that stores a short piece of text, most often a URL, so a phone camera can open it without anyone typing. It is a picture of a link.
Query String
A query string is the part of a URL after the question mark, carrying key-value pairs such as src=newsletter and page=2. It passes small pieces of data along with the request.
Read-Only Link
A URL that lets someone view a file or page without being able to change it or the original behind it. Read-only describes what the recipient can do, not who is allowed to look.
Referral Traffic
Visits that arrived by following a link on another site, identified by the address the browser reports as the previous page. Anything the browser will not name lands in a separate bucket called direct.
Session Duration
How long a single visit lasted, measured as the gap between the first and last event a tool managed to record. Like bounce rate, it needs code running in the visitor's browser and it systematically undercounts the final page.
Short Link
A short link is a compact URL that redirects to a longer one. It exists to be typed, printed, read aloud or squeezed into a character limit.
Social Preview
The card a social platform builds from your page's tags when someone posts your URL — an image, a headline and a line of text instead of a bare address. You control it by what you put in the page head.
Unique Visitor
An estimate of how many separate people, rather than separate requests, reached a page in a given window. Every method of counting it is an approximation, and the window matters more than the word unique suggests.
URL Anatomy
URL anatomy is the set of parts a web address is built from: scheme, host, path, query string and fragment. Knowing which part is which explains most link problems in seconds.
URL Encoding
URL encoding replaces characters that are unsafe or reserved in a web address with a percent sign and two hex digits, so a space becomes %20. It is why a filename with spaces or accents can break a link.
URL Fragment
A URL fragment is the part after the hash, such as a section name or a page number. It tells the browser where to scroll or what to show, and it is never sent to the server.
UTM Parameter
A tag added to the end of a URL to record where a visit came from. Analytics tools read the tag and group the visit under the campaign you named.
View Count
The number of times a page or file was successfully requested. It counts requests, not people — one person reloading four times produces four views.