Orangeinks

Terrify your Friends by Masking your Links with ShadyURL

ShadyURL is most of the time a URL shortening service. On other occasions, it somewhat lengthens other URLs, especially the already short ones, just to accomplish its true purpose. It masks your links and makes them look suspicious and frightening.

Use it like most URL shortening service. Paste the URL you want and ShadyURL will generate a suspicious looking link to send to your friends. It will look as if you’re sending them a link to a malicious website which is enough to frighten a soul who is web literate enough to understand it. It’s great for scaring your friends especially if they’re asking an important link from you. It will make them think twice before clicking the link that you sent them.

Aside from the shady URL masking, you can, of course, use the service to shorten URLs and get less shady looking ones. Simply tick the “shorten (somewhat less shady-looking)” box and you’ll be able to generate a more decent short links than ones that contain a malicious_cookie word on them.

The service clearly states that it is for entertainment purposes only and the user is solely responsible for the content behind the links generated using the site. You also need to be somewhat cautious before sending the generated shady links for some of them can be offensive. All I’m saying is read the generated links before sending them even if it’s just for fun.

Tags: Mask URL, ShadyURL, short url, Shrink URL

Lnk.By: Give Meaning to Short URLs

Lnk.By is a new URL shortening service that promises to give URL shrinking a whole new meaning, literally. This is what a link shrinking service should be like. The short link that Lnk.By creates describes the content found inside. A lot of people are hesitant to click on short URLs because they are afraid of what they’ll find on the other side. Lnk.By can be used to create a more transparent description of what’s inside the shrunken URL.

If you’re going to forward link which contains music, you can easily provide a short URL description saying that what’s on the other side of the link contains music by using the lstn.in URL. The watch.it URL can be used for shortening long video URLs, see.it for photos and read.im for text content.

Even with the link description, the service is not fully protected from people who hide mischievous URLs behind link shorteners. If they can detect pages that doesn’t match the link used to shorten it, which would be very cool, they can reduce the usage of misleading content behind shortened URLs.

Additional Info

This service was created in one weekend. This site will be adding new features regularly, and we’ll also be updating our lists of domains, protocols and file extensions that map to either WACH, SEEE, LSTN, or READ.

*The service is still in Alpha stage

Tags: short url, Shortener, URL

LongURLPlease: Short URL Expander for Firefox

LongURLPlease is a Firefox extension that allows you to expand shortened URL’s. Nowadays, short URLs are being thrown around the net more than the original ones are. This is thanks to social networking sites like Twitter and the likes.

Shortening URLs has its advantages, but it also puts the end user at risk. With LongURLPleas installed on your browser (Firefox), you can immediately get an idea on what you’re getting yourself into by having access to the original URL right away. You don’t have to click a button or anything just to view the original links. LongURLPlease will do it for you as soon as you encounter a shortened URL. Check out the screenshot below to see how the URLs on Twitter appears after installing the plugin.

Supporting these 30 services so far: adjix.com, bit.ly, dwarfurl.com, ff.im, idek.net, is.gd, ln-s.net, loopt.us, ping.fm, piurl.com, piurl.com, poprl.com, qlnk.net, reallytinyurl.com, rubyurl.com, short.ie, smallr.com, snipr.com, snipurl.com, snurl.com, tinyurl.com, tr.im, twurl.nl, ub0.cc, ur1.ca, url.ie, urlx.ie, xrl.us, yep.it, zi.ma, zurl.ws

Another tool that you can also use to expand shortened URL’s is LongURL. They have this neat tool that you can use on your websites which allows users to view the full expanded version of the tiny URL. They also have a Firefox extension available. Check it out and see which one works better for you.

Tags: Expander, Firefox, Long URL, short url, Tiny URL

Shrinkify: Produce Shorter URLs Using Firefox

Shrinkify is a URL shortening web tool similar to TinyURL and FuseURL. Basically, all of the mentioned URL shrinking tools pretty much does the same thing but with some differences in their approach on shortening URLs. TinyURL, the most popular among three now provides a preview mode for its generated tiny URL. FuseURL however made a different approach by letting users to fuse together several URLs and create a single short URL for easy sharing of multiple sites. So what’s special about Shrinkify? It shrinks better.

Aside from making long URLs short, Shrinkify also provides you with an option of choosing an even shorter URL. They said that it is for people who are very much concerned with the number of bytes they spend on a URL. Below are the examples of the shrunk URL which are produced by Shrinkify.

Short URL:
http://shrinkify.com/7qk

Shorter URL:
http://s7y.us/7qk

Besides producing shorter URLs, Shrinkify’s main features include OS-X desktop, Firefox browser and iGoogle integration. The mentioned features will let you do the URL shrinking without actually going to the Shrinkify website and paste a long URL to make it shorter. You can do it in your Firefox Browser by downloading the Shrinkify Firefox Add-on. They also have a Mac OS-X dashboard widget and a gadget for iGoogle.

Tags: Firefox, firefox add-on, igoogle gadget, os-x dashboard, short url, shrinkify, URL, widget