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?