LB 17 Aug 05

Generally, I’m not a fan of these services - 9 times out of 10 it means the person sending it to me has something to hide (such as an affiliate link). If I’m sent a link, I want to know where it’s going to take me without having to take a gamble.

Johan 17 Aug 05

LB: Ill + on that. Anyways, link urls and link names are not the same. short name does it’s job imo.

Clay Loveless 17 Aug 05

Once you get to http://37signals.url123.com/SalonArticle, aren’t you better off just maintaining a little .htaccess file with rewrite rules … so you can use http://37signals.com/SalonArticle?

You can even:

• Update a short link if the destination link changes, without breaking the short link!


• track how many clicks were made on the link (write a micro script for this, or do a quickie custom config for Analog)

Popping open .htaccess with “External edit” in Transmit, adding your new URL, saving … doesn’t take that much longer than using TinyURL or anything else, and you aren’t asking your users to put their faith in some third party.

How’s that for a step up? ;-)

Brady Joslin 17 Aug 05

Typically, I am wearly of these types of links, as well, especially with the increase of phishing scams. I guess you could say it makes me “apprehensive” as to where exactly the link will take me and what information is being captured on me during a redirect process. There is something to be said of URL usability. Also, you can’t discount the branding provided by using your actual domain name in your links.

But, sure there is a tradeoff here if the URL you are trying to share is fairly gruesome. So, what I’m suggesting is that the ideal solution would be using a URL rewrite process on your own server.

Dan H 17 Aug 05

Yeah, Url123 does look better. I wouldn’t use the features that make it better, personally.

At work, I’m looking into making one of these sort of url shortening apps for our intranet. I do have to agree with you guys that having marketing info sent to you with urls that look like they’re from different places is bad. Doing the .htaccess change would be my vote in those cases.

Steve 17 Aug 05

I just did something similar to this for a project, and Implementing this service on your end is anywhere from about 10 minutes to 2 hours, depending on how you want to set it up. I’ll explain the 2 hour version first.

First: Database with your shortened “url key” and your longer “full url”

Second: Small PHP/Ruby/Perl script which will query the database for the “url key” and depending on your preferences, either do a header redirect, a 301 page moved, or a 302 page moved, or use filesystem reads to read the “full url” page right into that script.

Third: mod_rewrite to intercept these shortened urls of a certian pattern, and rewrite them, so the “url key” is passed to the script you already wrote.

The major benefits here are that you don’t have to depend on a third party, don’t have to worry about what the third party is doing with your customers, can implement (or not) any sort of tracking, authentication, or whatever else you might deem needed.

The simpler, 10 minute version of this is that you could always just put the redirects right into the .htaccess or httpd.conf and just use mod_rewrite without any sort of database or script. But this puts the workload on each individual page to do any additional processing, such as tracking/logging/authentication/etc.

Sounds like a fun idea for a little open source app.

-Steve

furvyn 17 Aug 05

lnk.to used to show the real URL before redirecting. looks like it’s been going through changes and may not do that anymore. Some of the new features look neat, such as private lnk.to’s.

furvyn 17 Aug 05

oops, meant to add http://lnk.to/tiny37 as an example. (instead I linked it to the name)

Silus Grok 17 Aug 05

I’ve used TinyURL in the past, but the concerns raised here have certainly made me think twice about using such a service in the future.

That said, .htaccess files scare the hell out of me… anyone have a suggestion for a tutorial on editing/using them?

* crosses fingers *

PersonalTaste 17 Aug 05

I think the people on this list are overlooking the fact that these services are excellent when used in a non-commercial setting. How many times does a parent, sibling, spouse, friend or child reply to your email stating “the link didn’t work.”

You check your quoted message only to find the link broken across two lines. Rather than explain YET AGAIN that you need to put broken links back together if using a POS email client, I just TinyURL it and resend.

And when used in a commercial setting, they are equally effective as long as the commercial entity is trustworthy.

So if you receive something from PAYPAL with a tinyurl in it, be smart, don’t click it. If however, you are reading a newsletter that you SUBSCRIBED to, by all means, trust that clicking the link won’t DO much other than bring you to a web site.

Maybe it’s a Mac vs Windows thing, personally, I’m not AFRAID to click ANY link. I do however avoid clicking links in unsolicited emails, and if the SPAM piques any interest I usually copy the link out of the email and paste it in the browser to make sure it’s not actually going elsewhere, or secretly trying to pass any variables/info that could reveal my address to be valid.

Alex Cabrera 17 Aug 05

That said, .htaccess files scare the hell out of me… anyone have a suggestion for a tutorial on editing/using them?

If you have mod_rewrite installed in your apache server it’s really simple.

Let’s say you have the following folder structure

yourhost/
index.html
anotherdir/
——file.html

http://yourhost/ would take you to index.html, and http://yourhost/anotherdir/file.html would take you to the file.html file inside of the “anotherdir” directory.

Now, let’s say you want to http://yourhost/file to take you directly to http://yourhost/anotherdir/file.html - for this we need rewrite rules in a .htaccess file.

In the root directory we create a file called .htaccess with the following contents

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^file$ anotherdir/file.html

The ^ tells the rule to start from the current directory (in this case the root directory and the $ tells it where to stop. Now, the cool part about all of this is that you can use regular expressions to be able to match a range of possibilities and even pass them on as variables to other pages.

Mark 17 Aug 05

“…So if you receive something from PAYPAL with a tinyurl in it, be smart, don’t click it. If however, you are reading a newsletter that you SUBSCRIBED to, by all means, trust that clicking the link won’t DO much other than bring you to a web site…”

So, tinyurl and url123 can cause user apprehension and mental overhead?

OweBoat 17 Aug 05

I like SnipURL:

http://snurl.com/features

Seems very similar to URL123.

Kelby 17 Aug 05

to create subdomains for each user automatically, like in basecamp and the url linker, do you have to host your own server or can it be done on say a windows or linux 3rd party hosting using clever scripting type stuff.

any clues??

Kelby

ceejayoz 17 Aug 05

I’ll chime in with a “I hate tinyurl-style links,” too.

Seems like something you could do as a Rails app in about 30 seconds - just do something like http://links.37signals.com/283 - without having to rely on a 3rd party service and dubious looking URLs.

Bob 17 Aug 05

tiny url makes it great for Goatse links…..

Brady Joslin 17 Aug 05

So, tinyurl and url123 can cause user apprehension and mental overhead?

Exactly!

Speaking of that, so does this form. A Preview Comment button would reduce the my apprehension of how my comment is going to display when I hit submit, espcially when I try to embed HTML. Once I hit submit, there is no comment editing feature and the page is forever locked in cyberspace.

…grimacing while hitting submit…

Brian breslin 17 Aug 05

i think a little php powered htaccess writer would be a great script. just install it in your root, so you could build up urls like “http://37svn.com/muahahah” and it sends you to muahahah.com

I think I would use it for my own sites for email lists (find some cheapo .us domain thats short to use for it). helps you keep your branding one extra second ;-)

JohnO 17 Aug 05

I’m with Steve, I don’t see why a simple redirect can’t solve these problems… Why must we depend on an outside service for such a simple solution? Furthermore the user apprehension/fears when the link doesn’t go explicitly to the domain you expect (though, we techies are truly the only people that look at links - studies back that one up)

Alexandre Simard 17 Aug 05

I guess you could say it makes me “apprehensive”

Nice little poke. Much better than what 37s has been getting here lately. Thanks for the chuckle!

Ryan J. Bonnell 17 Aug 05

Better usability would be maintained if the links were “cruft free” and kept under 70 characters (the width of most plain text e-mails).

As much as 37Signals prides themselves on usability, I would have expected more. Using a service like url123.com or TinyURL.com to include hyperlinks in your e-mail(s) should be obvious that something should be done internally, not externally.

If something is worthwhile enough to done, then it deserves to be done right. We all know that Cool URIs don’t change but better managing the length of your URIs is the best solution.

Why not get real, keep it simple, do it yourself, and deliver?

Brian Oberkirch 17 Aug 05

You might also check out elfURL (http://www.elfurl.com) —> tinyURL + tagging, stats, rss. My pal had the idea and banged it out in a few days, just to see what people would think. How useful it might be.

Darrel 17 Aug 05

There’s also http://makeashorterlink.com/ which doesn’t have the fancy features but does show the URL it will redirect to before redirecting.

pwb 17 Aug 05

Agree with many that it seems this is easily implemented on your own server.

I’m not sure why it would even require htaccess or mod_rewrite.

Couldn’t you just write a simple Perl (or whatever) script that looks up the URL based on the code and does a location or meta refresh or JavaScript onload redirect?

and 17 Aug 05

http://linky.us

kelby 17 Aug 05

I use the custom 404 error page to launch an asp script that strips the url and parses the result against a look up table.

Jack DeNeut 17 Aug 05

Based on a post by a friend of mine (http://mambofrog.com/2005/05/18/tiny-urls-doiop/), I took up the challenge of writing a better TinyURL. It’s up at http://i90.org. Took about 6 hours to write.

At the time, I though the idea of letting the user pick his own sub-domain was a clever hack, but it looks like it’s been done before. Just shows that there are few new ideas on the internet.

As for the “why not just use a redirect on your own server” comments: most people don’t run their own servers. I agree that 37Signals could easily do this, but not a regular joe.

Fanboy 17 Aug 05

What happened to “Less Software”?

Danno 17 Aug 05

What reallly bothers me about tinyurl and ilk is how the hell do they make money?

Steve 17 Aug 05

pwb: Mod rewrite is used so you don’t have to have to show the ?a=b&c=d stuff on the end of the url.

with mod_rewrite: http://mydomain.com/blog
without mod_rewrite: http://mydomain.com/redir.cgi?goto=blog

So if you don’t mind passing the extra get parameters and advertising that your redirecting threm through a cgi script, the second one technically will work. The mod_rewrite solution is just a bit cleaner and doesn’t require as much effort to type of remember (which is the whole point).

-Steve

Kevin Brown 17 Aug 05

Using tiny URL to send out links on your own domain name strikes me as being incredibly stupid. There’s absolutely no reason why you can’t shorten your own URLs. It’s a script that’d take about 5 minutes to write.

TinyURL is great when you’re dealing with urls that you can’t control (especially useful when sending cnet articles to friends).

The idea of adding subdomains is downright absurd. How is making the url *longer* useful?

Wesley Walser 17 Aug 05

Kevin probably because the idea of branding anything (even a url) is irresistible to some, and quite honestly a great business tac.

Geoff 17 Aug 05

Here you go:

class TinyController

def dish_to
@longurl = TinyUrl.find(:first, params[:url])
redirect_to @longurl.url
end

end

pwb 17 Aug 05

Steve, “website.com/blog” would be easy to redirect with a 404 cgi.

“website.com/?blog” would also be easy to redirect without mod_rewrite.

Dan Hartung 17 Aug 05

The discussion about mod_rewrite and such seems distinctly orthogonal to this service, which is not really aimed at people who a) operate their own web servers and b) grok apache and mod_rewrite.

I haven’t seen a geek spoogefest like this since a 1991 argument over whether vi was better than Word.

Anyway, next time I’m talking to my client who’s a lawyer, I’ll tell him “just get into .htaccess … I’ll walk you through it”.

Seriously, though — the major issue that I have with services like these is that they’re not permanent. You can’t really trust a tinyurl (or my favorite, babyurl — as long as folks are plugging) to be around in five years, you can’t expect it to follow up if the target URL changes (without a proper, um, 301 page I think), and so on. So you’re not really going to use it for anything but transient applications — like an e-mail newsletter. I’m not sure that adding features really does expand the repertoire of potential uses that much, and most of them are pretty useless for the major extant application of this type of service.

So if they really do create a new market, more power to them.

Mark 18 Aug 05

I use these services for sending links to my friends for stores (Amazon etc) and other sites which have silly URLs. If I started needing it for my own, I’d be rethinking my URLs first, and .htaccess’ing after that.

Anders M 18 Aug 05

Manage your own extensions is nice.

As soon as someone makes a Firefox extension for it…

http://www.roundtwo.com/product/tinyurl

Anders M 18 Aug 05

There is also a service called shorl.com. They claim that by using koremutake they make the short URLs easy to remember. Sure http://www.shorl.com/geframesanadra is very easy to rememeber. :-)

Lode 18 Aug 05

Darrel wrote:

There’s also http://makeashorterlink.com/ which doesn’t have the fancy features but does show the URL it will redirect to before redirecting.

That’s a nice feature, but makeashorterlink (say that again, makeashorterlink) frequently ends up making the links longer.

When e-mailing something I usually use urlcut, since I can choose my keywords there as well.

Jens Meiert 18 Aug 05

Provides more features, and looks more appealing. (But it’s not coded that good yet.)

Henrik Lied 18 Aug 05

My five cents:

RewriteBase /red
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/$1.php [R=301,L]

I think that’ll work.

Alexandre Simard 18 Aug 05

Damn this is turning out to be a hot topic.

Remind me again what’s wrong with using the original URL, however long it is, inside less-than, greater-than characters, such as this:

<http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/
a_nice_customer_experience_from_american_express.php>

My understanding is that this will be clickable in almost all email clients, and that the few users with mail clients that don’t support it will have learned to manually edit multi-line URLs to make them work again. This solution requires *no* software, and causes *no* apprehension about what’s on the other side of the URL.

Of course, keeping the original URLs as short as possible helps too. I don’t use tinyurl or a similar service to quickly send interesting Web pages to a few friends. If your real URLs (the ones I see in my browser’s address bar) fit on one email line, you’re better off. In 37signals’ case, I’m pretty sure that their blog software also provides shorter, “machine” URLs to individual articles (&post_id=###) which could easily be used in their newsletter for the SvN pointers.

John Revel 18 Aug 05

Most people seem to be assuming that one has control over every URL there is … I have the choice to tell our execs that their blackberry webclient url is:

a. https://webclient.blackberry.net/WebMail/Window.jsp?site=mycingular

or

b. http://url123.com/blackberry

Tough one …

Alexandre Simard 18 Aug 05

Blackberry of all businesses should know better about their URL design. In an ideal economic world, a competitor would fix this obvious flaw in their service and John would also have the option to switch provider. But there’s an interesting topic here: URL design for Web clients with poor or absent keyboards. Probably already covered somewhere, of course.

Cade Roux 19 Aug 05

I like shrinkster.com - you can track how many people are using the shrinkster you make, too. There is also a tasktray tool which will detect when you’ve copied a URL and automatically turn it into a shrinkster.com URL.

Justin Koh 24 Aug 05

While we’re at it, I like http://doiop.com/

Ian Smith 06 Sep 05

Another site that also offers tracking is Xents.com - Throw away URLs, tracming

N 20 Sep 05

I like to use www.thiswebsitemakestheshortestlinkpossiblesopeopledonthavetorememberit.com.

Dave 05 Oct 05

I personally prefer http://yatuc.com
It has a realy short url (one character shorter than url123 :) ) and has also nice features (quick shortening, stats,…) and is realy fast.

Alex 24 Feb 06

Take a look at
http://my-own.net/
I think its better than tinyurl and URL123

modicr 24 Mar 06

http://thnlnk.com/
Semantic URLs

Christian von Kleist 01 Apr 06

DigBig.com and http://ipoo.org/ are still better.

Eugenio 28 Apr 06

I think http://urlcut.net is a very good one, probably the best it has also STATS!
Try it!

Eugenio 28 Apr 06

I think http://urlcut.net is a very good one, probably the best it has also STATS!
Try it!

Robert Nicholson 29 Apr 06

Which one actually passes thru parameters?

So if I have a cgi script and I want to pass thru the parameters to the url that’s mapped to the cgi script without parameters?

Why is it so hard to simply pass thru the parameters?

http://tinyurl.com/bla?parameter=”value”

http://www.somesite.com/cgi-bin/somescript.cgi?parameter=”value”

When using a cell phone it’s still nice to have the tiny url and bookmark it and then add the parameters as needed.

mhhh5 21 May 06

Try some open source scripts:

http://yasus.sourceforge.net/
http://www.snip.cc/

ajai 06 Jun 06

I am looking for a script to make long URLs shorter,
and have a graphic stats for example shortdot.net.
Does anybody know a ready-to-use-script for
this?

Thank you
ajai

Robert 22 Jun 06

I’m a fan of JTTY. Super simple, and has all the features i need.

DavidEzra 05 Jul 06

For a URL that is not only shorter, but also Personal, Memorable, and Unique - something for Photobucket, Flickr, etc. - you could also use http://www.urlDoctor.com.

Babooza 12 Aug 06

I use http://memurl.com

easier to remember stuff

George 04 Oct 06

So much for reliability… from url123.com:
This web site is temporarily offline as we are upgrading our web servers and moving them to a new data center.
If you have any questions, please contact Francesco at blackcoil@gmail.com
Thanks for your patience, and please revisit us in 24-48 hours.