

Ask HN: Unshortening links - profquail

I've seen a ton of articles in recent months about URL shorten services (and the dangers associated with using them). I'm curious to know why HN'ers aren't simply "un-shortening" URL's on any sites they control. If you are parsing URL's in your site's code and you maintain a reasonably definitive list of shortening services, why not write a little script that follows the shortened link to see where it really points and replace the shortened URL with the real link?<p>Including such a feature in your website would also go a small way towards preventing users from posting shortened links (assumed innocent) to known malware-infested sites, if you run something like a blog that allows comments.
======
commiebob
I saw this post and decided to throw something together

<http://slice.20oz.net/>

It will lengthen your URL and create a short url at tinyurl, bit.ly, and is.gd
for you.

So if you have some tr.im links to convert over you can just plug them into
here.

------
dkersten
One of the guys I know wrote this service, which has a firefox extension and a
JSON API for un-shortening URL's: <http://www.longurlplease.com/>

