

Long URLs Please - bdfh42
http://www.longurlplease.com/

======
Donald
Or, when using communication mediums where length isn't an issue, you could
courteously give your readers a _decent_ url:

<http://decenturl.com/>

e.g., <http://news.ycombinator.decenturl.com/long-urls-please>

And a tidbit for the sadistic: <http://hugeurl.com/>

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pmjordan
I can understand the Firefox extension as being something laudable, sure. But
an HTTP API? That seems kind of random, given that the URL shorteners work
with 30x HTTP responses. I mean, you just need to request the short URL and
read out the Location header of the 30x response. It seems... convoluted to go
via an additional server.

~~~
darraghcurran
Good point - what I've done is allow you to piggyback more than one lookup
onto a single request. so the plugin will batch them in groups of 4. does that
make sense?

~~~
pmjordan
Well, on the server you're still starting N requests based on my batch
request. I guess combined with caching that can make sense, yes. Even so, I'd
probably want to implement my own [1] when setting up my own web app for
reliability/trust reasons, and because of same-origin restrictions on client-
side scripting. (XHR does support not following redirects, but it's kind of
pointless with same-origin policy)

[1] I did exactly that for <http://tweetoftheyear.com/> in clojure:

    
    
      (defn lookup-redirect [url]
        (try
          (let
            [response (http-client/url-do url "HEAD" {:follow-redirect false})]
            (when (#{301 302 303 307} (:return-code response))
              (first (get (:header response) "Location"))))
          (catch java.lang.Throwable t nil)))

~~~
darraghcurran
I thought so, and I do cache everything nicely in memcache and db.

Also it's hard or maybe even impossible? to reliably fetch arbitrary short url
using javascript - exposing it as a simple json api makes this easy.

~~~
pmjordan
Yeah, it's only possible on the same hostname as the page you're on, which
limits the usefulness and makes the server-side lookup necessary. The JSON
solution will only work via a foreign host with a <script> tag as far as I
know, which again is something of a trust issue.

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zacharydanger
Taking the fun out of Rickrolling since 2008.

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nirmal
I've been using Twitter as part of my blog and have started replacing the href
of links with the expanded link. So if you go to my blog or follow me on
twitter the links look the same but if you hover on a link the status bar
shows the end link.

I do this on the server side, with Python code I mentioned
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=406608> but it is possible to do it
client side as well with something like <http://remysharp.com/tinyurlapi>

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meqif
The Firefox plugin at addons.mozilla.org is messed up (I looked at the
contents and found it's an html document). However, the "Benefit right away by
installing the firefox plugin" link has a working xpi. Just a heads-up for
anyone wondering why they can't install the plugin. :-)

EDIT: Oh, and the statusbar icon is utterly pointless.

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imusicmash
nice idea and thanks for including an API.

sort of related, I wrote a Greasemonkey script to automatically create bit.ly
urls as you type a Twitter Tweet. Does it on the fly. Uses the bit.ly API.
Check it out at <http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/39042>

~~~
darraghcurran
Nice! twitter confuses me how it will convert your urls to tiny urls when you
don't want to - but won't when you need it to.

~~~
imusicmash
yah.. I wrote it partly to take that ambiguity away.. also seemed a shame to
take up some of your 140 characters with a long url, then only to see that
Twitter compressed it for you in the saved Tweet, reminding you that you could
have typed more :)

~~~
darraghcurran
on the typing more front words - have you seen tweetshrink?
<http://tweetshrink.com/> \- it'll shorten words like later to l8r to save
characters - <http://tweetdeck.com> have integrated it's api into their
twitter client

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trickjarrett
There's also longurl.org - doing the same sort of thing.

~~~
darraghcurran
Yep - looks very similar to what I've done, I hadn't seen it until a few days
ago. We could do with even more similar services - to balance out the hundreds
of url shrinking services.

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racerrick
That's funny. I was just looking for this.

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kwamenum86
you can already use user-entered strings in tinyurl so i dont see the point of
using them as an example

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pclark
great idea. Installed :)

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zack
Thank you; installed.

