I thought you might be interested in taking a look at my new URL minifier: http://lncn.eu
This one is just for the University, operated entirely in-house, and because it’s a Labs project we can make it do what you want. Got something cool you want to see in a URL minifier? Want it to check links on occasion to make sure they’re working? Want to be able to change the destination of a link? Want to see custom namespaces for your links? Let me know.
1) Make it prettier
2) Add a copy button next to the minified URL which copies to clipboard.
3) Add Twitter integration, so you can post it, along with a tweet 😉 I use the bit.ly sidebar for that all the time.
4) Add a home menu link.
Thanks!
1) Prettier how?
2) Will be in the next update.
3) Twitter integration in the strictest sense will probably have to wait until we’ve mastered the single sign-on system. However, I’ll put a ‘tweet this’ link in the next update.
4) Done.
Prettier: When the short link is returned, rather than just list all the info down the left, can you space it out a bit more? Pad it out with some borders? Add some different tones to the page? bit.ly does a nice job of it 😉
http://bit.ly/?s=&keyword=&url=http%3A%2F%2Fjosswinn.org
Other than that, Paul has done a decent job of raising other improvements. It’s great work, Nick.
Capital stuff, and the first ‘live’ outing for the common web design?
1. Glad you’ve got rid of the hard-coded ‘http://’; that was a pain.
2. An explanation (on the ‘About’ page) of why it’s called lncn.eu might be nice? Or are you leaving that one to a gradual dawning of “….aaaaaah!”?
3. Don’t know if this is possible, but some sites I’ve seen (e.g. ) give you some embeddable code to put the QR barcode on your website. Any chance of that?
4. I make some reasonably heavy use of the is.gd API (http://is.gd/api_info.php). Could you replicate that?
5. Long-term guarantee of stability; yes please.
6. It doesn’t seem to like some of the URLs I’m throwing at it, tells me “Sorry, but X doesn’t seem to be a real URL”… e.g. http://openurl.ac.uk/athens:hum?genre=article&title=Journal%20of%20Children's%20Services&aulast=Frost&auinit=N&issn=2042-8677&atitle=Leading%20Children's%20Services%3A%20some%20contemporary%20issues%20and%20challenges&volume=4&issue=3&spage=49&epage=57&date=2009
7. IE7 renders it as “Done, but with errors on page”. That could just be IE doing its thing, but I thought you’d like to know.
8. I’m getting a PHP error on the stats page (e.g. http://lncn.eu/jv+).
7. Longer term – integration with RefWorks, please! 😛
Wow… what a handful!
1) Yeah, this was a pain and the fix made it more reliable anyway.
2) Documentation is a work in progress.
3) Yep, will be in the next update.
4) Yes. The API will be directly compatible with is.gd.
5) I’m talking to 301Works to guarantee long-term reliability even if I can’t look after it any more.
6) I think that’s down to the colon – I’ll check the URL validation regex.
7) Yeah, that’s some weird JavaScript. Will fix.
8) Noted. Will fix.
9) Massive integration with just about everything will be appearing over time.
Super, smashing, and great.
3) and 4) Sweet. I’m using a Google spreadsheet to maintain a table of information on key e-journals, with a QR-gen site plus the is.gd API generating links from each journal’s ISSN via our e-jnls A-to-Z site. (Then mailmerging the table to MS PowerPoint slides to create rolling displays on my digi pic frame, like this.) It’d be great to start using lncn.eu for these sorts of things.
6) I could encode the colon, I guess(?) – would be really useful to be able to pass around OpenURL links that aren’t longer than the article they refer to!
9) I know 🙂
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One more, while I’m on a roll… is there any facility to reserve ‘vanity’ URLs? I’d quite like to nab http://lncn.eu/lib without having to wait for 26^3 iterations or whatever. Any chance?
Cheers Nick,
Sorry, missing URL in (2) should be http://qrcode.kaywa.com/
Oh, and the quotes weren’t curly in my original long URL in (6), in case you were thinking that was the problem!
That’s WordPress’s own little weird bag.
Thanks for the changes you made following my suggestions (no need to remove the http:// bit from the beginning of the URL). Much more convenient now.
Nick – another thought – is there any way to capture / generate a screenshot image of the page you’re minifying? It would be really useful to be able to stick a URL in there and get a screenshot image, with its own persistent URL, which I could link to in blog posts etc.
Possibly – I’ll take a look at what wizardry I can work.
Thanks for sharing this! All the best!