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S.id

s.id

66 pointsukz33 comments

There are way way too many of these sites and frankly even just having one breaks the web. Look at this list of dead shorteners: http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=URLTeam#Dead_or_Broke... Imagine how many hyperlinks each takes with them when it dies and how many pages reference those links. Just stop it!

It wouldn't be quite so bad if there was a good one run by a non-profit or open foundation.

I'd never thought of this, but it's true and extremely harmful to the internet as a whole.

For just the opposite of these, check out Handle (handle.net)

It's a pay service to provide archival/permanent links. It's intended to help with URLs changing over time.

What is this? Clicked on the link browsing this site and looking at the landing page gives me no clue what this does and why I should care about this. There isn't even a help page there.

There's an edit box with placeholder text that says "Paste long url here," and a button next to it labeled "shorten." It seems pretty self-explanatory.

With several massive images that cover the screen with links to Indonesian landmarks... it's a... thing that shortens URLs into Indonesian landmarks?

All I can say is that on first glance it appeared to me to be a url shortener, and the thought that it, um, shortened landmarks... or something... never crossed my mind.

The label on the button only seemed to appear after loading the other, fuctionally irrelevant stuff for some 5-10 seconds.

If you click the tiny 'help' button in the footer, click on "User Guides", load the 3MB PDF file, then go to page 002 (page 5 in the PDF document), there is a short blurb about what s.id is and does.

I thought you were joking, but wow. The webmaster seems to have ordered the whole graphic design package for this website, where it's not needed at all!

Short domain, but stop with the background images. This design style is one of the reasons the internet still doesn't seem faster after decades of improvement.

I would much prefer a ~4KB HTML page with no dependencies containing just

    <form ...><input name="url"/><button>Shorten</button></form>

The domain name is simple. Why not make the page the same way to demonstrate this for your service?

This. No one is going here for pretty pictures.

That's why I just made my own: http://mtb.wtf

It's really just a personal experiment to see if I could write a useful webapp entirely in lua in my nginx config: https://github.com/matthewbentley/urlshort (which is actually a terrible idea in real life).

It also automatically saves pages on archive.org, and you can access the info on a short code at mtb.wtf/i/<code> (ie, http://mtb.wtf/i/e093b ). It also re-saves a fresh copy each time a url is re-submitted.

You can also request a specific short code here: mtb.wtf/addexact

Been using Google's shortener for a while, does the job. http://goo.gl

There's always http://oc9.org/yourShortURLHere but I always get complaints that it's not obvious what it does or how to use it

This is a url shortener made by PANDI [http://www.pandi.id], Indonesian .id (dot id) ccTLD.

Btw, they are opening anything.id right now, so you probably can search interesting domains like: humano.id, parano.id, etc.

We own http://literal.ly - look, it's all good fun. Go grab a cool domain while they're available...

For others who started thinking about what other options would be available: http://www.wordfind.com/ends-with/id/, but at 169/yr at 101domains (didn't do much shopping) it is too expensive for a lark. I mean what could I do with val.id? https://domainr.com/val.id

How much control does the Indonesian government have over the registrars? I note that my favourite registrar, Gandi, can't do .id. Do you recommend any in particular?

Looks like "Okusi Associates" have done what you suggest and bought most words ending in "id" - it costs less than 3USD/year. Pity.

Edit: Nope, got my conversion wrong. One registrar lists a fee of 275000 INR and many multiples of that for "short" domain names. Very glad I looked up what the thousands seperator was in Indonesia before clicking buy.

Isn't there hundreds of services that do this?

Yes, but this is the shortest url I've seen. If every character counts, this is the url shortener to use.

A few years ago, a URL shortener was running on the .to ccTLD itself. That was the shortest possible URL shortener service since there are no single-character TLDs. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to work anymore.

there was also another that was using a unicode character (an arrow) as its domain name, not shorter technically, but in any character-counting situation, just as short as s.id

Yeah there was →.ws or something like that. Still longer than "to" though.

We've used http://v.gd for years.

Admit it thats your site

nope. and the homepage clearly says it is sponsored by "memset", whoever they are.

Clearly "memset" != "daurnimator" so yeah Q.E.D.

What are your use cases for shortening links? Is it for print?

All else being equal, sure, but this shortener throws up a branded redirect page for a second instead of just doing an HTTP 301 redirect. IMO, every character would have to count a lot to make up for the bad user experience.

Plus, they can't keep it this short for long. They can only shorten 3,844 URLs before they get up to 8 characters, and only 238,328 before they get up to 9, at which point it's only 3 characters shorter than j.mp. Getting popular will actually hurt their advantage.

Every time the background image changed the entire page became unresponsive.

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