Universal Redirector Revealer - phase 1
The Universal Redirector Revealer is up, albeit humble. It’s a simple tool to find out what a short URL leads to without visiting the site. Tinyurl, snurl, ln-s, petiturl, decenturl are all supported, as well as many more similar services.
It’s using a bit of Ajax to show the destination URL and its title, storing the results in a database for instant results on the second and later requests.
I’m not too sure about the name, if you have any ideas, please share. If I was to theme this a bit, I’d maybe use a whistle blower allegory or, just thinking about this, a small amount of water used to soak and expand the tiny URL. That would certainly be friendlier ;) Should it be called the “expander”, then? Hmm…
Next phase will do a better job of following redirects and noting every hop. In some cases, like a login redirect, it’s probably more interesting for the user to see the URL right before the last one.
Finally, here are a few miscellaneous ideas to occupy my time:
- Store more HTTP headers and HTML head
- Interface to submit text containing a redirected URL and modify it using the final URL and its title
- Web service API
- After a while, we can offer a short URL service ourselves, defaulting to a known short URL from another service
- Tie into del.icio.us (popularity, tags)
- Directory of short URL services (redirectors)
- Tell if URL is password protected
- …
- More ideas?
Insta-url, just add water?
Chia-url? (potential trademark infringement, I suppose.)
Sea-urls? (like sea-monkeys, but also alludes to seeing the url.)
Comment by Steve Beattie — 2008/04/05 @ 15:22