This domain was still available, so I absolutely had to grab it. I’m also playing around with AJAX, and figured it would be a good idea to put together the following - a basic URL shortener.

I’m guessing I don’t need to explain its fairly-obvious function :)

I’m still going to add a “history” function to it, which is probably going to use basic registration (in Muti’s style) to record all the URLs you’ve ever shortened. I know I’d love functionality like that on is.gd, but sadly …

If you would like to use it, feel free - it’s parked at href.co.za. There’s a little red “Report Bugs” link at the bottom there in case you come across anything weird (I’d appreciate it if you’d report bugs).

Updates - Additional Functionality

I’ve added three new functions to href, which I’ll quickly detail here:

Preview page:
Add a “-” to the end of an URL (eg, http://href.co.za/5d-) to get a landing page that tells you where you’re about to go. Call it a confidence thing :)

Expand URL:
Add a “+” to the end of an URL (eg, http://href.co.za/5d+) to have href return, in plaintext, the final destination URL. Useful for services that need to expand shortened URLs ;)

Quickshorten:
You can have href shorten an URL instantly by providing it in a GET string. For instance: http://href.co.za/?url=http://woganmay.com/. This will start the shortening process immediately, and provide the result via AJAX (as if you’ve entered it manually). Note that the http:// part is important.