Expanding URLs in Dabr / Twitter

Terence Eden — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 11:46:55 +0000

I hate shortened URLs with a passion. It makes it hard to see what a link is and whether I've visited it before. If they fail - like tr.im threatened to do - you lose your links with no way to see where they once went.

So, hurrah for LongURLPlease - a service which takes those horrid little links and turns them in to full sized URLs.

Here's the basic code in PHP to use the service.

function long_url($shortURL)
{
 //Use the LongURLPlease API
 $url = "http://www.longurlplease.com/api/v1.1?q=" . $shortURL;

 //Set up CURL
 $curl_handle=curl_init();
 curl_setopt($curl_handle,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
 curl_setopt($curl_handle,CURLOPT_URL,$url);

 //Get the JSON response
 $url_json = curl_exec($curl_handle);

 //Close the connection
 curl_close($curl_handle);

 //Decode the JSON
 $url_array = json_decode($url_json,true);

 //Get the Long URL out of the array
 $url_long = $url_array["$shortURL"];

 if ($url_long == null) //The service couldn't find a long URL
 {
 return $shortURL;
 }

 return $url_long;
}

So, how should this be displayed to the user in Dabr?

There are three possibilities.

Display

<a href="short.url/foo">VeryVeryLong.Url/Bar</a>

This keeps the redirect, but it displays the full URL for the user.

Pros.

Get to see what the content is.
Allows the short URL service to record hits etc.

Cons.

Won't highlight if you've already visited it.
May cause problems if the VeryLong.Url is too long for the screen.

All Change

<a href="VeryVeryLong.Url/Bar">VeryVeryLong.Url/Bar</a> This completely replaces the short URL.

Pros.

Hurrah! No more silly URLs.
Will highlight if you've already visited it.
You can seen what you're about to click on.

Cons.

Breaks any statistics management the short URL service was performing (is this a con? Surely the receiving website should be recording such details?)
May cause problems if the VeryLong.Url is too long for the screen.

Background

<a href="VeryVeryLong.Url/Bar">short.url/foo</a>

Pros.

Will highlight if you've already visited it.
You can seen what you're about to click on if you hover over the URL.
Won't cause problems if the URL is too long for the screen.

Cons.

Breaks any statistics management the short URL service was performing (is this a con? Surely the receiving website should be recording such details?)
User can't immediately see what they're about to click on.

Conclusions

I prefer replacing the URL completely. I see no value in the various short URL services. The stats that they gather don't seem any better that those your webserver can provide.

However, long URLs can be messy - especially on small screened devices.

Long URLs on a BlackBerry

So, which do you prefer?

longurlplease – Terence Eden’s Blog

Expanding URLs in Dabr / Twitter