by jebus989 on 5/22/14, 12:04 PM
All the usual HN nitpicking and obscure edge case discussion should probably be done in the light of ehamberg's own comment: "This is a horrible idea in many ways and was a quick hack for fun." [0]
[0] https://github.com/ehamberg/9m
by riffraff on 5/22/14, 11:53 AM
by Cthulhu_ on 5/22/14, 12:54 PM
While this is pretty neat, is there still a market for URL shorteners? It's been mentioned in this discussion already that Twitter does it automatically already - iirc, that was the main use case for shortened URLs. The other use case is gathering statistics (how many people clicked on my link), but the URL doesn't need to be short for that, a simpler redirect service would work just fine for that.
The final one is simple printable URLs which people can enter easily. That's also a valid use case I think, but mainly if you can create your own URL, i.e. shorturl.com/hackernews; a random collection of numbers and letters is hard to type in on a cell phone and easy to mistype.
by batuhanicoz on 5/22/14, 12:01 PM
Short URL's have two purposes for me:
- They are easier to spell on the phone (This is not.)
- I like to track the clicks (Which I can't do with this.)
But, as a proof of concept, this is nice.
OT: Oh, I'm turning into a real HNer with this comment.
by DoubleMalt on 5/22/14, 11:48 AM
I don't think risking url rendered as unicode boxes justifies the reduction of the url by 2 or 3 characters.
Nice proof of concept though.
by gojomo on 5/22/14, 12:02 PM
From the source code README <
https://github.com/ehamberg/9m>:
9m Unicode URL Shortener. Generates a shortcut from http://9m.no using two unicode characters, e.g. http://9m.no/പ湛.
The server will choose two characters at random from the all the printable characters and then cross its finger and hope you use a great font.
(This is a horrible idea in many ways and was a quick hack for fun.)
by martin-adams on 5/22/14, 11:50 AM
I'll be screwed if I ever have to retype the short URL. So no good for printing on packaging.
by LatencyKills on 5/22/14, 11:51 AM
Personally, I think this is awesome. If widely adopted it might to help ferret out all the software which still can't properly handle unicode urls (which is probably why it won't be widely adopted). :)
by rcarmo on 5/22/14, 2:49 PM
Back when Gruber tried to do something like that in his @daringfireball Twitter feed, it was so incredibly annoying to have the links fail on all my mobile devices that I set up a Python script to convert the links and re-post them under a @darlingfireball account...
He recently posted about that not making sense anymore due to Twitter's URL shortener, but I don't have the link handy offhand.
by chx on 5/22/14, 11:52 AM
You should combine this with the trick Tinyarrows is doing since 2008: the domain name is a single Unicode character; I guess Punycode FTW :)
by smoyer on 5/22/14, 12:00 PM
I got
http://9m.no/𑂜൭ for my daughter's website, but I'm wondering whether this helps shrink character count when used for services like twitter. It's not at all readable, but since it's two (I think) 4-byte unicode characters, will that URL be counted as 13 characters or 21 characters?
by lnanek2 on 5/22/14, 5:27 PM
by PDegenPortnoy on 5/22/14, 3:08 PM
by tunesmith on 5/22/14, 6:24 PM
I tried shortening a vanity domain of mine, and the asian characters can roughly be translated as "produce fire from the rays of the sun and break wind". I don't think I'll market that shortcut.
by MaxGabriel on 5/22/14, 2:34 PM
What was your experience like using Scotty /Acid-State for this project?
by mp4box on 5/22/14, 11:55 AM
Probably should block the same domain from shortening.else you'll get something like
http://9m.no/婀蒾 (multiple redirects)
by izzydata on 5/22/14, 2:12 PM
So, what would happen if I put in a url, then took the generated url and generated a shortened url on that and then did it again for about 1000 times?
by Aoyagi on 5/22/14, 12:59 PM
URL shorteners without privacy policy make me feel uncomfortable, but I guess it's understandable in case of a new and tiny project.
by tytso on 5/22/14, 4:07 PM
This is a great way of finding all sorts of bugs in your support of Internationalized Domain Names.
by shanth on 5/22/14, 2:11 PM
Haskell <3
by matsuu on 5/26/14, 4:24 PM
by nawitus on 5/22/14, 5:00 PM
Didn't work in a tweet.
by mykhal on 5/22/14, 1:23 PM
why would anyone in the unicode age have to shorten the urls? (:
by jedicoffee on 5/22/14, 12:54 PM
krl.io son son
by xsace on 5/22/14, 12:20 PM
9m.no/鼞ϧ