Coming in FeedDemon: Know Where That TinyURL Will Take You

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:

• TinyURL
• bit.ly
• is.gd
• Snurl / Snipr / SnipURL
• twurl.cc / twurl.nl
• URL.ie
• traceurl

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:

• 0rz.tw
• Cligs
• ff.im
• hex.io
• idek.net 
• ppt.cc
• kuso.cc
• rubyurl.com
• tr.im
• xrl.us

Comments

[Tim Cochran]

http://shrinkster.com/ is another URL shortener service.

[Jedi]

http://0rz.tw/ is another popular URL shortener service in Taiwan.

[123]

http://0rz.tw/
http://kuso.cc/
http://ppt.cc/

thank you

[Nick Bradbury]

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.

[unwiredben]

newsjunk.com uses URLs in the format

http://x.techwheat.com/2WO

[Jiří Bureš]

http://www.jdem.cz/

[Nino Benvenuti]

http://rubyurl.com is another URL shortener service.

[Nick Bradbury]

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?

[Bevan Arps]

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.

[Nick Bradbury]

@Bevan: Thanks for the tip - I'll contact Carl about this.

[Pilotbob]

There is...

go.to

BOb

[Su]

icanhaz.com ?

[Nick Bradbury]

@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).

[Dave]

Fantastic idea! I appreciate the focus on safe surfing...

[krishna]

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