I know, just what the world needs, another URL shortener. Still, I was tired of being confronted with links on twitter like: "Coolest thing ever - http://short.url/12345. So in order to add a little context to my links, I created my own shortener. Give it a shot and let me know what you think.
Why the need to include the time it took you to build? I've seen it done more than a few times and I've always found it annoying. No one cares, TBH. Let people appreciate your work for what it is. Kudos on the project though.
I like the idea a lot. I'm always suspicious of shortened urls, but I feel that those who share my caution may also share my appreciation of the NoScript plug-in. New users may be more inclined to use your service with a regular form submit opposed to one that only works with javascript. Coming from HN I was willing to whitelist your site but others may not be.
Guess you didn't know about my http://DecentURL.com -- which does more or less the same thing. Though that was inspired by a comment on reddit, not so much by a real need. :-)
DecentURL gives even more context -- it inserts the domain like yours, but also grabs the page <title> and uses a short form of that as the link part (or you can type in your own, shorter one).
While both show some context, DecentURL is not a shortener. For example, I took the URL of this comments thread and stuck in in both yours and ctxt.us:
In fact, yours lengthened the URL quite a bit. Not that DecentURL is not without its application, but your claim that it is the same as ctxt.us is not really valid. I quite enjoy the fact that this is a way to have your cake (a short url) and eat it too. (actually know what the hell you're clicking on)
You're right -- DecentURL is not a shortener. You can do some shortening with it, but its main goal is to make decent URLs, not tiny ones. So ctxt.us has it's place -- I stand corrected. :-)
One-Day Project, that's kind of the trend these days! We also built a URL Shortener recently in a day, with the One Day App event. The challenge is fun, and makes you narrow your features down to something doable in a day. Good work.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 31.8 ms ] threadDecentURL gives even more context -- it inserts the domain like yours, but also grabs the page <title> and uses a short form of that as the link part (or you can type in your own, shorter one).
Original - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=731637
DecentURL.com - http://news.ycombinator.decenturl.com/hacker-news-one-day-pr...
ctxt.us - http://ctxt.us/news.ycom/A
In fact, yours lengthened the URL quite a bit. Not that DecentURL is not without its application, but your claim that it is the same as ctxt.us is not really valid. I quite enjoy the fact that this is a way to have your cake (a short url) and eat it too. (actually know what the hell you're clicking on)
Props to ctxt.us.
Gonna throw it on my blog to give it some cool Twitter points. :D