Pygmy: Open-source URL shortener in Python | Hacker News Reader

Pygmy: Open-source URL shortener in Python

github.com

54 pointsamitt00116 comments

Have you given much thought to how this link shortener might be abused? Your https://pygy.co/ example site doesn't provide an abuse contact, for example. That doesn't help when someone sets it up deliberately to host spammy links, but providing a default abuse contact page might be a good general step to raise awareness that link shorteners are often abused, and that anyone using the project responsibly should be prepared to handle abuse complaints.

That's a good suggestion. I am gonna add it. Thanks!

Just wondering, what's the actual use-case for an URL shortener in 2018?

I would understand maybe like 10 years ago when SMS was still king and you were limited in characters, but now?

URL shorteners now look shady (and can be used to conceal malicious links), could track you, and even if they have no nefarious intentions it's still an extra DNS lookup, HTTPS negotiation and redirect.

TLDR: good project as a proof of concept, but seems completely irrelevant nowadays.

It's true that URL shorteners use has changed how it was used a few years back but it's still very relevant.

One very good use case of link shorteners is marketing & sales campaigns. A lot of marketing companies like to share short and branded custom links on social media and later check the click and other stats to see the conversion rate.

I have also seen companies using URL shorteners for internal link sharing.

I have two real cases where my project is used are:

- One of the schools in Spain uses the project website(pygy.co) for creating secret links and sharing with students in school competitions. They share the password with the winners(I received an email from them). - One of the company is China has forked the project and are using it.

Anyhow, I created this as a personal project for learning purpose but I can see it's use cases.

> A lot of marketing companies like to share short and branded custom links on social media and later check the click and other stats to see the conversion rate.

True, but as an user it does not serve me (quite the contrary actually, as it invades my privacy), so my point (and habit) of never clicking into shortened links still stands. I’m actually surprised brands would prefer shady-looking links over linking to their own domain directly.

Not to mention, you can do analytics server-side on the page you’re linking to without having to have an intermediary system & extra redirect.

> Anyhow, I created this as a personal project for learning purpose but I can see it's use cases.

Quite impressive actually, seems very feature-complete and well built. Keep up the good work!

Just to add on, sometimes it's useful to be able to link to large query strings without large numbers of characters in situations where there's no way to copy and paste (for example any form of print media).

Many internet giants have set up their own link shorteners for this very purpose: see https://goo.gl/ and https://t.co/

Presentations linking to the demo, links to an exam sign in, or some other type of event where the person giving the link does not necessarily have a contact with the person who needs to be clicking on it, but having the full link would be onerous to jot down.

When I worked at Twitter, they had an internal URL shortener that made it easier for employees to visit internal sites. Using an easy-to-remember customized short URL is easier than navigating the internal wiki or looking up the link in your e-mail.

My company does the same, and it can be convenient.

Twitter's public link shortener, t.co, is one of the worst, imho, because it ubiquitous (so you can't just treat all t.co short links as junk) and yet they make it really difficult report spammy short links. Often these short links get used outside Twitter's platform.

This kind of project allows companies to host their own shorteners, which is an entirely different use-case than some random shortening service used by the public.

Your project name is Pygmy But your url is pygy.co

That's kind of weird, if the url was , pygmy.co , it would be better.

It was not available and don't have that kind of money, for a demo project, to buy it :(

Has anyone contacted you yet with the explanation of the word "pygmy" and the tremendous harm that you're causing?

Wikipedia:

>In anthropology, pygmy peoples are ethnic groups whose average height is unusually short.

"Tremendous harm" How?

I imagine the commenter is concerned about the colonial/bigoted connotations that word carries when applied to people groups.

Pygmys are a subset of a species whose physical attributes are smaller than the main species. Applying that to people is obviously... Problematic at best.

I don't see how reusing the word, given its original use in biology, is directly causing harm. If anything I think it's a clever and decent reclaimation of the word.

May I point out the Wikipedia page listing hundreds of plant and animal species whose names are prefixed with the word "pygmy" to describe their diminutive size?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:PrefixIndex/Pygmy

Seems unlikely that those adjectival usages are causing "tremendous harm".

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