Alternately, many offer preview functions: http://preview.tinyurl.com/OperationBSU

Sometimes, the URLs can be more descriptive than the original URLs: http://tinyurl.com/Missionaries-Jailed-in-Gambia actually tells you something about the story, as opposed to the long BBC.co.uk URL that only tells you it has some relationship to Scotland.

Mind you, if various sites offered more concise, descriptive URLs, nobody would bother with shortener services.

instead, I change the underlying href (so the click of the link will go straight to the right location, and so it can also get the “visited” color styling behavior), and also I add a title/tooltip attribute to it so that a user who hovers over the shortened URL (which preserves layout needs) can see the expanded URL in the tooltip and in the status bar of the browser. Best of both worlds. :)

Now, if they’d get a crossdomain.xml policy file, that’d be nice.

In FF, the page jitters, the status bar shows some Javascript, etc.

I’ve tried clicking it, dragging short URLs to it etc. Nothing works.

Suggestions?

I’ve a greasemonkey script for longurlplease – but the firefox extension runs earlier/quicker – I may throw it up on userscripts so that greasemonkey fans can use it.

In the future I may look at lengthening them in order of how reliable/quick I know the shortener service to be, batching the dodgy ones near the end. Caching helps this also – once we’ve lengthened a url from a slow/unreliable service once – it’s only a question of how quick/reliable longurlplease can be!!!

Thomas, I’m so glad I scratched this itch – it’s been fun – and now I hope it’ll be useful or inspiring for others.

David, great to hear you like it. Keep me posted if you integrate it somewhere – or if you’ve any feedback to improve it. I like your DLINK link improver btw.