Ask HN: Review my attempt to create a non-misleading url shortener.

Well, it doesn't help if the url itself isn't very expressive, of course. So you'd be safe from <a href="http://p4ge.in/goatse/1e" rel="nofollow">http://p4ge.in/goatse/1e</a> but not from <a href="http://p4ge.in/utube/1d" rel="nofollow">http://p4ge.in/utube/1d</a><p>It's not as short as other shorteners, and just to have something that's easier to remember, couldn't you just use custom urls at existing sites?

Cool but it makes the url longer again, which kind of defeats the purpose, no?<p>If you want to improve url shorteners (which are bad for the web imo), you should build a simple open software script people can install on their own domain so that they can create short links to their own pages on their own domain. Much more future-proof (ie. if it goes down, only links to its own domain go down).

I felt really evil, so I tried: <a href="http://مثال.آزمایشی/" rel="nofollow">http://مثال.آزمایشی/</a><p>It takes it without complaining then offers a non-working gibberish URL in return: <a href="http://p4ge.in/آزم�/m" rel="nofollow">http://p4ge.in/آزم�/m</a><p>Aren't encodings fun? ;)

It seems like a really nice idea. One issue is that if the domain name is really long, then it doesn't really shorten it (like my domain name: osirisdevelopment.com). Perhaps you could do some manipulation for domains over say 6-7 characters so it looks similar but shorter.