NTA launches beta version of the National Journey Planner

So it looks like the journey planner is slowly improving.

1) It looks like the IP address ugliness is now gone.
2) It looks like you can now link to it, e.g.:

http://journeyplanner.transportforireland.ie/nta/XSLT_TRIP_REQUEST2?sessionID=0&language=en&commonMacro=true&name_origin=suburbID:57102040:10824015:Swords:718232:253448:ITMR&type_origin=any&name_destination=suburbID:57102020:10822006:Inchicore:711422:267009:ITMR&type_destination=any

However the link is pretty horrific. They should really try and use a url shortener service. For instance the above link can be shortened as so:

http://bit.ly/Obx6Y0

Also it would be better if when you do a search, the page reloads with the above url in the url bar so that you can directly copy it or bookmark it, rather then have to copy it out of a separate pop-up window.

I note that this seems to be the same company who developed the London Journey planner, though having now tried it, I don't think the London journey planner is very good either. But it does have one advantage, when you do a search, it puts the linkable url in the url bar.

Also it would be great if they could drop the nta/XSLT_TRIP_REQUEST2 part, which is ugly and entirely unnecessary as it could easily be hidden with some DNS redirecting.

As a side note, I think it is a pity that the NTA used transportforireland.ie as their website. It is a very long URL. I think they should just have used transport.ie instead.

Yes transport.ie is currently being used by the Department of Transport. But that could have been moved to departmentoftransport.ie or similar as it would be far less used then this site anyway. Then we could have had the following, a nice short url:

plan.transport.ie

Victor wrote: »

There are only so many short links to go around and people can be sceptical about using them. They aren't necessarily useful for de-bugging.

Not true, you can simply use a hash algorithm. For instance you can do it with google:

http://goo.gl/maps/kAv8N

Similarly it would be brilliant if you could have:

plan.transport.ie/kAv8N
and
a-b.ie/kAv8N

Victor wrote: »

But Google, Bing and OPenStreetMap don't do this.

I agree and I believe they have this wrong. Their approach breaks the link-ability of the web. However note Google does have the option of the URL shortener.

hittheroad.ie however do it brilliantly.

As to a-b.ie, yes it exists, but then it redirects in a pretty ugly way to the big long nasty ugly looking url.

Also I think it would have been overall better branding, they could then have had the likes of:

plan.transport.ie
leap.transport.ie
taxi.transport.ie
cycling.transport.ie

etc.

Much easier to remember and put on advertising on the side of a bus, etc.

I know that they can put a-b.ie on instead, but then that doesn't build a consistent brand with the other parts of the site.

We instead have the typical unintegrated Irish approach of leacard.ie, a-b.ie, etc.