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Does a URL shortener service exist that compresses the URL instead? It wouldn't be as short of course, but then you could recover the original URL yourself if the service is down. A browser could, should this become a popular enough method, be capable of detecting such compressed URLs and doing the decompression and redirect

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Depending on how obscure your links are, you can use .htaccess to go from mysite.com/blog/2012/05/05/somethingsomethingsomething to mysite.com/s/1231, assuming it's not a static website.

Stack Overflow do the same for instance.

I think he's talking about something that shortens any arbitrary link.

That was my impression, too, but I just wanted to cover a - comparably - dead-simple solution, since we sometimes forget the old-school approaches to an agonizing problem.

With .htaccess, there isn't really anything external - a new point of failure - to screw up the redirects.

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