Shortable: An Open Source Mega-Shortener

For a project I’m working on, I needed to resolve a list of shortened URLs from a variety of the most popular URL shorteners, given a long URL (or a short URL).

It occurred to me that many developers, especially those interfacing in some way with Twitter, could probably use this functionality. Because as things stand today, trying to gather any kind of intelligence about link propagation is much tougher than it should be for Twitter devs.

So I coded this mega-shortening handler as a simple open source app and threw it up on App Engine. From start to finish, it took just under an hour. While watching TV.

View Shortable at http://shortable.appspot.com

I’ve done some basic load testing, and it should be able to withstand a good amount of hits from your program. Still some things missing, like caching, a bunch of other URL shortening services (there are dozens!) and rev=canonical support.

But hey, it’s open source and it works.