One-Day Project: ctxt.us - url shortener with context | Hacker News Reader

One-Day Project: ctxt.us - url shortener with context

ctxt.us

20 pointsTravisLS10 comments

I know, just what the world needs, another URL shortener. Still, I was tired of being confronted with links on twitter like: "Coolest thing ever - http://short.url/12345. So in order to add a little context to my links, I created my own shortener. Give it a shot and let me know what you think.

Guess you didn't know about my http://DecentURL.com -- which does more or less the same thing. Though that was inspired by a comment on reddit, not so much by a real need. :-)

DecentURL gives even more context -- it inserts the domain like yours, but also grabs the page <title> and uses a short form of that as the link part (or you can type in your own, shorter one).

While both show some context, DecentURL is not a shortener. For example, I took the URL of this comments thread and stuck in in both yours and ctxt.us:

Original - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=731637

DecentURL.com - http://news.ycombinator.decenturl.com/hacker-news-one-day-pr...

ctxt.us - http://ctxt.us/news.ycom/A

In fact, yours lengthened the URL quite a bit. Not that DecentURL is not without its application, but your claim that it is the same as ctxt.us is not really valid. I quite enjoy the fact that this is a way to have your cake (a short url) and eat it too. (actually know what the hell you're clicking on)

Props to ctxt.us.

You're right -- DecentURL is not a shortener. You can do some shortening with it, but its main goal is to make decent URLs, not tiny ones. So ctxt.us has it's place -- I stand corrected. :-)

I like the idea a lot. I'm always suspicious of shortened urls, but I feel that those who share my caution may also share my appreciation of the NoScript plug-in. New users may be more inclined to use your service with a regular form submit opposed to one that only works with javascript. Coming from HN I was willing to whitelist your site but others may not be.

Why the need to include the time it took you to build? I've seen it done more than a few times and I've always found it annoying. No one cares, TBH. Let people appreciate your work for what it is. Kudos on the project though.

One-Day Project, that's kind of the trend these days! We also built a URL Shortener recently in a day, with the One Day App event. The challenge is fun, and makes you narrow your features down to something doable in a day. Good work.

Great idea. Just tried it. You should consider adding metrics to it down the line, but I bet you that you might find an audience for it.

Gonna throw it on my blog to give it some cool Twitter points. :D

Glad you liked it. Thanks for the shout-out on your blog / twitter.