[Site News] Silly, trivial URL redirect service.

smlnk does it, tinyurl does it, and now, I [sic] do it too.

I got bored and decided to whip up one of those trivial URL redirect systems. It took about an hour. It’s quite simle to use, as well – to be redirected, for instance, http://holwegner.com/r/em2gX was a quick redirect back to my beta web page. It’s automagical.

How do you use it? That’s quite easy, as well; for the full web interface, http://holwegner.com/r/ is certaintly the most user friendly – or if you want to automate it a bit, you can post your data to http://subgenus.com/a/$url – it will reply in plain text with your link, similar to how smlnk’s client interface does, although mine will accept URLs and the ID via GET or POST, I don’t really care. ;) There’s a bit of trivial code to ensure anything you enter is prefixed by http:// – sorry, no other links will work; wether ftp://, https://, gopher://, et al. I consider it a security measure.

If you want a javascript-able button, drag this to your menu bookmarks, then, when you want a tinier url, just click the shiny candy-like button.

Note that if you use the /a/$URLSTRING method, Apache strips anything that might be considered a post delimiter. My virtualhost and localized rewrite abilities are kind of limited that way. Use the manual interface or the javascript above, instead, or just post to the interface – it’s pretty easily disernable from the entry page.

This service has no warranty, and will probably break once in awhile. I currently have created no automated system for pruning URLs, but they are all timestamped, and I will eventually start removing them by date; most likely expiring them after a few month’s time.

[Edit: This service is now available upon one of my ‘play’ domains, subgenus.com. All redirects should be made, tested, and executed there. I no longer offer such services on my personal domain. Anything useful will be placed upon subgenus.com, and the useless little toys, shawnshacks.com.]