9m.no – Short URLs for the Unicode Age (opens in new tab)

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

http://tinyarrows.com/ has existed for years and is actually shorter, i.e. http://➡.ws/鷇

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.

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.

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.

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.)

I'll be screwed if I ever have to retype the short URL. So no good for printing on packaging.

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). :)

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.

You should combine this with the trick Tinyarrows is doing since 2008: the domain name is a single Unicode character; I guess Punycode FTW :)

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?

http://9m.no/؞雅 ⇩ http://www.google.com

Kind of disappointed I got a two character code. Has he used up all the one character ones yet? Time to start a new domain!

Added to Ohloh: https://www.ohloh.net/p/nine_m, or to stay stylistically consistent: http://9m.no/ꋅ곁

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.

What was your experience like using Scotty /Acid-State for this project?

Probably should block the same domain from shortening.else you'll get something like http://9m.no/婀蒾 (multiple redirects)

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?

URL shorteners without privacy policy make me feel uncomfortable, but I guess it's understandable in case of a new and tiny project.

This is a great way of finding all sorts of bugs in your support of Internationalized Domain Names.

Haskell <3

Didn't work in a tweet.

why would anyone in the unicode age have to shorten the urls? (:

krl.io son son

9m.no/鼞ϧ