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/

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.

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?

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)))

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.

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.

nice - I've been meaning to learn a bit of clojure. I hear your point on wanting to set up your own - and as you've shown it is easy to do.

Taking the fun out of Rickrolling since 2008.

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

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.

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

I've been wanting to use this for a long time but Safari's version of Greasemonkey doesn't support the GM_xmlhttpRequest function anymore.

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.

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 :)

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

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

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.

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

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

great idea. Installed :)

Thank you; installed.