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Comment by tweetwidget | Hacker News Reader

I've actually tried this on the main site, but it was not so successful. Mostly because the links are shortened, and I don't have the capacity to unshorten every link (most computation is done client-side anyway), and programs like VigLink don't look at short links either.

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Have link HTML printed out as per normal, attach JS that routes every clicked link through your servers. E.g.

    This is a twitter <a href="http://bit.ly/blah"
    onclick="document.location='http://yourservers.com/follow?url=' +
    escape(this.href);return false">link</a>.

That way you can look up the Twitter links only if they are clicked and any slow down happens after the click, not before display.

As a bonus you get to see what links everyone is clicking as well.

You'd likely need to roll your own mini-crawler to dig out the shorten links, and where applicable, create new ones and replace them. Questionable indeed.

Ahh, yeah hadn't thought about that....you'd have to unshorten and then re-encode every amazon link. Still though, seems like it might be possible.

You may want to use http://unshort.me api service to unshorten the links.

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