After talking with Chris Pirillo over Twitter, hearing him say how most short URL services don’t do good pretty semantic URLs, and thinking I could build a better solution, I did.
urlTea
A Web 2.0 look at the Short URL services. Light, simple interactivity. Intuitive design. And even an API! I’ll probably GPL it soon too…
Your thoughts?
Can you elaborate on what shortcomings other tinyurl services have? and what the advantages yours has over them? Just wondering!
Nice service, the stats feature will be good when it’s done. Shame that urlt.com was not available though
Good idea, Brett. I have a suggestion that would solve a problem for me, and probably others as well. Can you allow short URLs without any “/” characters? I know it is more limiting, but something like “NXN.urltea.com” would be very useful. Here’s why.
I use GoDaddy’s DNS service and can make most of the changes I need except for one thing (so far). I like to connect my Gmail for Domains sites to my registered domains through an easy to type URL like “mail.domain.com”. The real URL for Gmail is partnerpage.google.com/domain.com. Unfortunately, GoDaddy’s DNS will not accept this as a valid domain. GoDaddy will let me point to any URL as long as I don’t include a slash “/”. I currently use an external DNS manager to accomplish this, but a free solution would be better. Basically, if I could choose what I call a “clean” URL with no slashes using urltea.com, I could type mail.domain.com and get to my domain’s Gmail start page. Thanks for listening.
Chris, this service is great! I’ve added the link to my tool bar and plan to use it. But the one thing I was really wanting to use it for was mp3 files on my site (class teachings from our church). We have teaching files we send out the link for to those who miss class, but we don’t post it on the web site. I like to obscure the actual URL. But when I use urlTea to link to an mp3 file, a page loads but I guess FireFox doesn’t know it’s an mp3? In any case, it will not open up an external player or give me an option to save the file. Any suggestions?
@chris: I see the issue you have. Unfortunately, where urlTea is (currently) hosted, we can’t do a solution like : http://1e3.urltea.com or http://1e3.link.urltea.com/ … but it’s a good idea and we’ll keep it in mind 🙂
[…] by Brett Tayor translates long, tedious URLs to make them shorter. It’s similar to TinyUrl, but slicker and […]
Check out http://traceurl.com
There you can choose the prefix of the generated URL. Thus the short URLs don’t look that cryptic. On top of that you can monitor accesses to the URL, meaning count accesses and see where the visitors come from.
so, what happened to urltea.com ? issue with scalability (looks like it was hosted on dreamhost)? would love to see a writeup, if only brief, on the situation?