Mining Monday: link.toolbot.com

Starting today, every Monday (or when I happen to remember to do it) I’ll survey my vast empire of websites and find something interesting, amusing, or useful (in my estimation) to post here.

Up today: link.toolbot.com, my link-shortening service. It makes what are probably the longest links of any link-shortening service out there. However, it has two features that I haven’t seen elsewhere which I think are kind of neat. I continue to use it myself because of them. They are:

1. Domain names in the shortened links. You are guaranteed that a link of the form link.toolbot.com/example.com/99999 redirects to the example.com domain.

2. Canonical shortening. The service has internal recipes for trimming bloated URLs from Amazon, eBay, news.com, dealnews.com, and others. It strips out the superfluous cruft and gives you an alternate URL at that same site (e.g. eBay) that is much shorter. With the recent trend of inserting verbose, but discardable, page titles into CMS URLs (presumably to be more search-friendly), I expect this feature to become more and more useful.

There’s a handy bookmarklet, too, so you can shorten the URL of the page you are viewing with a single click.

So there you have it. As always, feedback and suggestions are welcome.