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I guess I was just a little prescient back in 2011, when I wrote of URL-shortening services in a blog post, "let's not forget that these entities have a nasty t

I guess I was just a little prescient back in 2011, when I wrote of URL-shortening services in a blog post, "let's not forget that these entities have a nasty tendency to vanish". Not that being prescient about the Big G end-of-lifing services is particularly visionary or difficult, tbh. The post[1] was to publicise a small shortener I'd written for myself (Java/JSP solution) -- in many ways deficient and lacking all sorts of features (stats, UI) but it worked well enough for me for a time until I got lazy, got ill, and got rid of the server it was running on. But I was bang on-target about the likelihood of such things disappearing under the waves. I guess it's time to dust it off[2], bring the codebase up to date and get it working again. I'm a bit doubtful about hosting it on, say... Google Compute free-tier or something... for who knows when /that/ service will get taken down. [1] http://onemikro2nd.blogspot.co.za/2011/04/shrtn-url-shortener.html http://onemikro2nd.blogspot.co.za/2011/04/shrtn-url-shortene... [2] https://bitbucket.org/mikro2nd/shrtn https://bitbucket.org/mikro2nd/shrtn

xiphias 9y ago
all existing links will continue to redirect to the intended destination. It would be a PR nightmare for Google if they stopped redirecting existing links, but they won't do that as they're a huge user of the web graph as well.
- mikro2nd 9y ago
  Indeed, I saw that redirection will continue to work. It wasn't clear to me, though, whether any of the other stuff -- stats, particularly -- will continue to work.
asaph 9y ago
> it worked well enough for me for a time until I got lazy, got ill, and got rid of the server it was running on. But I was bang on-target about the likelihood of such things disappearing... Oh, the irony...
- sethammons 9y ago
  Kinda the opposite of irony. They said these things disappear. Had they said, "but this one won't," then we would be approaching irony.
  - asaph 9y ago
    My impression was that building his own URL shortenner was undertaken as a mitigation of the risk of other URL shortenners disappearing.
joshu 9y ago
It has been obvious that they were bad for a while. I called it years before: http://joshua.schachter.org/2009/04/on-url-shorteners http://joshua.schachter.org/2009/04/on-url-shorteners And no, the answer is not running more shorteners. You are just making the problem worse.

xiphias 9y ago

all existing links will continue to redirect to the intended destination. It would be a PR nightmare for Google if they stopped redirecting existing links, but they won't do that as they're a huge user of the web graph as well.

mikro2nd 9y ago
Indeed, I saw that redirection will continue to work. It wasn't clear to me, though, whether any of the other stuff -- stats, particularly -- will continue to work.

asaph 9y ago

> it worked well enough for me for a time until I got lazy, got ill, and got rid of the server it was running on. But I was bang on-target about the likelihood of such things disappearing... Oh, the irony...

sethammons 9y ago
Kinda the opposite of irony. They said these things disappear. Had they said, "but this one won't," then we would be approaching irony.
- asaph 9y ago
  My impression was that building his own URL shortenner was undertaken as a mitigation of the risk of other URL shortenners disappearing.

joshu 9y ago

It has been obvious that they were bad for a while. I called it years before: http://joshua.schachter.org/2009/04/on-url-shorteners http://joshua.schachter.org/2009/04/on-url-shorteners And no, the answer is not running more shorteners. You are just making the problem worse.