ur.ly - the underappreciated URL shortener

Friday, 23 July 2010 04:25:10 UTC

I say underappreciated because it has all the good things you could want of a URL shortener (it makes URLs very short, is fast, scalable, and should last), yet everyone I know is using bit.ly, ur1.ca, or, worse, tinyurl.com.

The URLs generated by ur.ly use capitals, lowercases, and numbers, and the domain is 5 characters (u, r, ., l, and y), making it give one of the shortest URLs of any service (only one I know of that gives shorter is to., which doesn't work everywhere). It's also hosted on Google App Engine, so it'll be reliable and long-lived.

For comparison...

[15]to.http://to./5xn8
[17]ur.lyhttp://ur.ly/icM6
[19]ur1.cahttp://ur1.ca/0tiyk
[20]bit.lyhttp://bit.ly/da408z
[26]tinyurl.comhttp://tinyurl.com/36r5vuc
[37](original)http://www.notriddle.com/blog/45/