If anybody missed it, the last few days has seen plenty of buzz around a new proposal on how to solve the problem with URL shorteners. I kind of got lost in all the different methods and proposals people are discussing, suggesting or implementing, but I went ahead and added some simple logic to lnkd.in, to do a HTTP HEAD request to the given URL, looking for headers in a couple of the formats suggested. I figured that was going to get out of date pretty quickly, so I modified it to use the RevCanonical API, seems to work pretty well, returning a rev=canonical url wherever possible.

I also contributed a basic bit of code to Rob Allen’s Shorter Links plugin for wordpress, allowing users to specifying a base url, davedevelopment.co.uk isn’t all that good for short URLs. Just need to upgrade the plugin and decide on a short domain for my blog now.

Update: registerd daved.in, works a treat