nicholasjon.com

When the dot-me domains were released a few weeks ago, I thought it might be fun to pick one up and officially launch some “url shortening” code I’d been experimenting with. Today I managed to put the finishing touches on the first version of pnt.me — which I think looks a lot like “point me,” but won’t waste any extra characters in your tweets.

It’s a standard url shortener, meaning you give it a link that looks something like http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&pwst=1&q=url+shortening&start=10&sa=N and it gives you back something more like http://pnt.me/CzwU9K.

• There’s a “copy to clipboard” link, saving you the trouble of highlighting, right-clicking, and so on. Not huge, but nice.
• Adding a semi-colon to the end of any link will forgo automatic redirection, and instead take users to the “details” page for that link. Check it out: http://pnt.me/CzwU9K;. It’s useful for those times you want to see exactly where you’re going, instead of being Rickrolled.
• There’s also the beginnings of a sort of spam-alert, in that if enough people have clicked the abuse link the automatic redirection stops. Users are instead taken to the details page and shown a warning letting them know them know there have been reported problems with the content behind the shortened link. Everyone can still get to their destination — but it’s at their own risk. I set up a fake one here http://pnt.me/PjgpM9; so you can see what I mean. (Update: Enough people clicked through anyway that the warning went away. I guess the system works.)

I’m working on a bookmarklet that will let you shorten links from anywhere on the web, but it’s got issues in IE. And sites with frames. And Wikipedia. (Like I said, I’m working on it.) Try it out if you like, your mileage may vary. I hope to have a new and improved (read: “working”) version up soon.

All in all, I’m quite happy with how things are coming together. It’s fun to polish and release code originally intended to just be a weekend project. Personally, I got a lot more out of the experience knowing it would be in front of someone other than me when it was finished.

Thanks to everyone on Twitter who helped test things out this afternoon. And extra thanks to Jaythan for adding some most-excellent style my wireframes.

A Ferris Bueller’s Day off reboot.