URL Shortener

Long links break. They wrap awkwardly in messages, get truncated in print, and become unusable the moment someone has to read one aloud or type it from a slide. A short link fixes all of that by standing in for the real address — which is also exactly what makes shorteners worth being careful about.

A short link hides where it goes. That is the whole feature and the whole risk, and it is why so much phishing arrives as a shortened URL. This one therefore does two things most do not. It refuses links that are mechanically dangerous — anything that is not http or https, addresses with a username and password buried in them, and links pointing at private or local networks. And it lets anyone check a link before following it: add a plus sign to the end of any short link and you get a page showing the real destination instead of being taken there.

The links do not expire and there is no account to lose access to. The code contains nothing about you, and the destination is stored exactly as given — there is no second redirect through an advertising page, and no interstitial counting down at whoever clicks it.

This is the one tool here that genuinely cannot run in your browser, because a short link has to keep working for someone else, on another device, later. It therefore needs a small amount of storage on our side: the destination, a random code, when it was made, and how many times it has been followed. To limit abuse we also keep a salted hash of the address that created it, which lets us count recent links without knowing who anyone is.

Do not use a short link for something private. Anyone who has the link can follow it, the codes are short enough to appear in browser histories and shared screenshots, and we cannot vouch for where any given link leads.