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About Me

PBX I'm Paul Bissex, and e-scribe.com is my consulting business. I build web applications using open source software, especially Django. In the '90s I did graphic design for newspapers and magazines. Then I wrote technology commentary and reviews for Wired, Salon.com, Chicago Tribune, and lots of little places you've never heard of. Feel free to email me.

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I'm co-author of "Python Web Development with Django", an excellent guide to my favorite web framework. Published by Addison-Wesley, it is available from Amazon and your favorite technical bookstore as well.

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Built using Django, served by Apache and mod_wsgi. The database is SQLite. The operating system is FreeBSD, on a VPS hosted at Johncompanies.com. Comment-spam protection by Akismet. Vintage topo imagery from the Maptech archive. The markup engine is Markdown.

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A different kind of URL shortener

Today I'm launching my first Google App Engine site. While I built it largely to play with GAE, it is also useful in its own right (I like to think so anyway). It does two different things:

Link shortening without redirection. Put in a godawful long Amazon link and get back a shorter Amazon link. Works with eBay and a few others too. I welcome recipes for other sites. (For the programmers in the audience, which is most of you -- yes, the processing is via regular expressions.)

It does some basic checks to confirm that the shortened URL returns the same page as the original one.

Link expansion. Put in a link from a URL shortening/redirection service, e.g. bit.ly, and see where it redirects to. Works with a slew of popular link-shorteners, including the house brands goo.gl and nyti.ms.

Some of the shortening services do offer a way to see the link target before you visit it, but they're all different; this presents a simple unified interface to that feature.

There's a bookmarklet too. If you have someone in your online life who frequently bombards you with, say, mile-long eBay links, tell them about it.

http://urlworks.appspot.com/

Sunday, August 29th, 2010
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4 comments

• Comment from Ian Bicking , later that day

I've never tried it, but I always thought if you just made the request (maybe with HEAD) you'd simply look at the Location header to see the destination (and not follow the redirect, of course).

• Comment from Paul , later that day

Indeed, that's the basic recipe. In the shell I just do:

curl -I bit.ly/foo | grep ^Location

• Comment from Adrian Holovaty , later that day

Oooh, cool service! Thanks for putting this together, Paul.

• Comment from Brian Johnson , 3 days later

You can get amazon urls a bit shorter still by using amzn.com.

The link expansion is definitely a nice feature.

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