URL shorteners such as TinyURL perform a handy service: give them a long URL, and they return a shorter URL that’s less likely to break in emails. Twitter users in particular benefit from URL shorteners because they enable shrinking a URL that would otherwise exceed Twitter’s 140-character limit.
There is, however, a downside. When you’re faced with a short URL, you have no idea where it really goes. Does it redirect to a useful site, or does it go to a phishing page? For all you know, the link could point to a porn site that pops up the kind of images that your boss wouldn’t think too highly of.
In my case, I use FeedDemon as my primary web browser, and I was tired of looking at my Twitter page and not knowing where all those TinyURLs would take me. So I decided to address this problem.
Starting with the next build of FeedDemon 2.8, mousing over a short URL will show a balloon tip which contains the long URL – so you’ll know where the link takes you before you click it. Here’s how it looks:
So far, I’ve added support for the following URL shortening services:
If you know of any popular URL shortening services that I’m missing, let me know by posting a comment here. As long as the service returns the long URL in the location header after doing a HEAD request, I should be able to support it in FeedDemon.
Update: Since originally blogging this post, I’ve added support for these services:
http://shrinkster.com/ is another URL shortener service.
http://0rz.tw/ is another popular URL shortener service in Taiwan.
http://0rz.tw/
http://kuso.cc/
http://ppt.cc/
thank you
Thanks, guys. It looks like I can support all of these except Shrinkster, which redirects to an HTML page before redirecting to the actual long URL.
newsjunk.com uses URLs in the format
http://x.techwheat.com/2WO
http://www.jdem.cz/
http://rubyurl.com is another URL shortener service.
OK, I’ve added jdem.cz and rubyurl.com to the list. I’m not sure about x.techwheat.com, though – does anyone besides NewsJunk use it?
You wrote:
> I can support all of these except Shrinkster, which redirects
> to an HTML page before redirecting to the actual long URL.
Shrinkster.com is now hosted by Carl Franklin (of DotNetRocks fame) – drop him an email and I’m sure you’ll be able to work out a way to support this functionality.
@Bevan: Thanks for the tip – I’ll contact Carl about this.
There is…
go.to
BOb
icanhaz.com ?
@Pilitbob: It doesn’t look like I can support go.to – instead of using a redirect which I can capture, they use an HTML page containing an IFRAME with the actual page (and show a banner ad above it).
Fantastic idea! I appreciate the focus on safe surfing…
there is a service called minyurl newly introduced.
my blog is http://weblogzz.blogspot.com and was given the link as http://www.minyurl.net/tech