This weekend, I started to play around with Jetpack from Mozilla Labs. [...] The widget that I created–TinyFinder–looks for rev=canonical links in a webpage, and displays them in the statusbar of the browser window. Rev=canonical links are meta tags that are used when a website wants to suggest a preferred tiny url to use. [...] Several services are starting to employ their own custom tiny urls: Dopplr, Threadless, Songza, and many more. – Scott Robin

sites could use YQL to grab the #revcanonical links. we shouldn’t have any problem scaling to do this: http://bit.ly/ZHRgO #yql – Sam Pullara

My suggestion for the whole #revcanonical #shortlink problem is a new HTTP method: GETSHORTY! – Jeff Jones

One of the small tools that I think would make rev=canonical even more useful is a rapid, brainless way to create short URLs for any domain. It’s possible, in a brief PHP script that only knows how to speak HTTP, to:

1. Redirect from short URLs to long URLs
2. Respond with a short URL for a given long URL
3. Add a new short URL for a given long URL

The rev=”canonical” convention makes a nice addition to the stable of nice semantic richness that can be added to particular flavours of hyperlinks. But it isn’t without its critics. [...] The unbelievable speed of adoption of rev=”canonical” shows that it fulfills a real need. – Jeremy Keith


use WWW::Shorten 'RevCanonical';

my $short_url = makeashorterlink($long_url); # Note that this could fail and return undef

# Or, use WWW::Shorten::Simple wrapper
use WWW::Shorten::Simple;

my @shorteners = (
WWW::Shorten::Simple->new('RevCanonical'), # Try this first
WWW::Shorten::Simple->new('TinyURL'), # Then fallback to TinyURL
);

my $short_url;
for my $shortener (@shorteners) {
$short_url = $shortener->shorten($long_url)
and last;
}


The nice thing about this approach is that it makes it trivial to add custom URL shortening domains to other projects—a quick view function and a few lines of nginx configuration are all that is needed.

Bookmarklet: Shorten (drag to your browser toolbar)

The premise is pretty simple. In order to avoid the great linkrot apocalypse, we can opt to specify short URLs for our own pages, so that compliant services (adoption is still low, because the idea is pretty fresh) will use our short URLs instead of TinyURL.com (or some other third-party alternative) replacements. – Chris Shiflett