Yes, it's the new hype - URL shorteners (mostly for use in Twitter).
Some use the classic
tinyurl, then there's
is.gd and
bit.ly and a fair bunch of others.
As some people already wrote, and I feel no different here, broken links are baaad, mkay?
So the easiest way would be to get a short domain for yourself and run your own url shortener.
I am happy enough to have secured myself a not yet publicly announced 3-char .de domain which
I'm planning to use for that. This and being bored for 2h led me to roll out my own shortening service.
Enter Shortcore - 259 lines of php code, working already.
It needs PHP 5.2.0+ (I think :P) and sqlite and I've put it up on
github - it's BSD licenced and comments and patches are very much appreciated.
How to use it when it's installed:
- http://example.org/_[uniqueid] redirects to what you saved.
- http://example.org/_[uniqueid]_ shows a preview
- So I have "xxx.de/_ab" - as low as 10 chars for an url (excluding http://), that's not less than a bit.ly url (currently at 5+ chars after the /) and I can still put normal content (not starting with a "_") on the domain - fair deal I think
- there's a bookmarklet for easy saving, either provide the [uniqueid] or let it be generated automatically
- it's not meant as a public shortening service, so probably some basic auth has to be added
