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I can understand the Firefox extension as being something laudable, sure. But an HTTP API? That seems kind of random, given that the URL shorteners work with 30

I can understand the Firefox extension as being something laudable, sure. But an HTTP API? That seems kind of random, given that the URL shorteners work with 30x HTTP responses. I mean, you just need to request the short URL and read out the Location header of the 30x response. It seems... convoluted to go via an additional server.

darraghcurran 18y ago
Good point - what I've done is allow you to piggyback more than one lookup onto a single request. so the plugin will batch them in groups of 4. does that make sense?
- pmjordan 18y ago
  Well, on the server you're still starting N requests based on my batch request. I guess combined with caching that can make sense, yes. Even so, I'd probably want to implement my own [1] when setting up my own web app for reliability/trust reasons, and because of same-origin restrictions on client-side scripting. (XHR does support not following redirects, but it's kind of pointless with same-origin policy) [1] I did exactly that for http://tweetoftheyear.com/ http://tweetoftheyear.com/ in clojure: (defn lookup-redirect [url] (try (let [response (http-client/url-do url "HEAD" {:follow-redirect false})] (when (#{301 302 303 307} (:return-code response)) (first (get (:header response) "Location")))) (catch java.lang.Throwable t nil)))
  - darraghcurran 18y ago
    I thought so, and I do cache everything nicely in memcache and db. Also it's hard or maybe even impossible? to reliably fetch arbitrary short url using javascript - exposing it as a simple json api makes this easy.
    - pmjordan 18y ago
      Yeah, it's only possible on the same hostname as the page you're on, which limits the usefulness and makes the server-side lookup necessary. The JSON solution will only work via a foreign host with a <script> tag as far as I know, which again is something of a trust issue.
  - darraghcurran 18y ago
    nice - I've been meaning to learn a bit of clojure. I hear your point on wanting to set up your own - and as you've shown it is easy to do.

darraghcurran 18y ago

Good point - what I've done is allow you to piggyback more than one lookup onto a single request. so the plugin will batch them in groups of 4. does that make sense?

pmjordan 18y ago
Well, on the server you're still starting N requests based on my batch request. I guess combined with caching that can make sense, yes. Even so, I'd probably want to implement my own [1] when setting up my own web app for reliability/trust reasons, and because of same-origin restrictions on client-side scripting. (XHR does support not following redirects, but it's kind of pointless with same-origin policy) [1] I did exactly that for http://tweetoftheyear.com/ http://tweetoftheyear.com/ in clojure: (defn lookup-redirect [url] (try (let [response (http-client/url-do url "HEAD" {:follow-redirect false})] (when (#{301 302 303 307} (:return-code response)) (first (get (:header response) "Location")))) (catch java.lang.Throwable t nil)))
- darraghcurran 18y ago
  I thought so, and I do cache everything nicely in memcache and db. Also it's hard or maybe even impossible? to reliably fetch arbitrary short url using javascript - exposing it as a simple json api makes this easy.
  - pmjordan 18y ago
    Yeah, it's only possible on the same hostname as the page you're on, which limits the usefulness and makes the server-side lookup necessary. The JSON solution will only work via a foreign host with a <script> tag as far as I know, which again is something of a trust issue.
- darraghcurran 18y ago
  nice - I've been meaning to learn a bit of clojure. I hear your point on wanting to set up your own - and as you've shown it is easy to do.