DecentURL
URL redirection is far from a novel idea – there are at least 41 other services that do it. As far as I can tell, however, those sites all focus on making long addresses short. DecentURL can make URLs short too, but its primary goal is to make them decent. Teach ’em some manners.
DecentURL can also grab a title automatically. Just leave the “decent title” blank, and it’ll get one from the <title> of the page you’re linking to.
And unlike TinyURL, decent URLs let you see where you’re going. For instance, links to YouTube become http://youtube.decenturl.com/decent-title (http://decenturl.com/youtube/decent-title works fine too). This means people can’t send you to nasty places without you knowing it.
DecentURL has some sweet premium services: edit your URLs, view click counts, and automatically detect broken links. Read more about these.
Expiration
DecentURL links will expire when I expire. No, seriously, the links don’t have an expiry date, so they’ll only expire when the site becomes history in, say, eight or ten years. Put it this way — if DecentURL is down, call me on my mobile, +64 21 331841, and even if you’re not on NZ time, I’ll get up and fix it. :-)
Inspiration
The inspiration for DecentURL came from a programming.reddit comment made in response to my “incredibly useful” submission of HugeURL:
I thought, based on “incredibly useful”, that it would let you turn inscrutable URLs such as youtube.com/watch?fwejfawneoia;wfn into hugeurl.com/?youtube-man-pretends-to-be-dog. It turns out that this is not the case.
But now it is! Thanks, serhei. :-)
