Today I ditched a feature-packed tracker-laden URL shortener in favor of a lightweight serverless solution deployed to Google Cloud Run. Links are managed in a Google Sheet doc, making it super easy for me to create new links as needed.
Check it out:
http://go.bowdre.net/shorterer
@corlin yep, I hear you on that. When I encounter untrusted shortened links in the wild, I usually will "expand" them via https://urlex.org/ or similar; that lets me know what's on the other end before clicking through, and anyone monitoring the shortened links clicks don't see my information at all since the request will be coming from another web server.
@corlin PS here's my un-shortened link in case you'd like to read how I did it 😁
https://virtuallypotato.com/free-serverless-url-shortener-google-cloud-run
@john_b
Yep I do this also...
but it is an extra step.
Someone needs to write a browser extension, that does this automatically.. with a output of yea or nay.
@corlin I'm on my phone at the moment so can't test the extension, but this might be worth checking out. Not entirely automatic, but 'right-click -> unshorten' seems like an improvement over doing it manually.
@john_b
This is a great idea...
My only gripe, is that the is no simple way to tell the difference between a good URL shortener, and a very bad one. So I avoid clicking on any shortened URL.
If there is, in fact, a way to check on a shortened link... please let us all know.