DecentURL launched
29 October 2007, by Ben
Inspired by a comment on programming.reddit, I set to work on a “Decent URL maker”. There are hundreds of URL shortening websites like TinyURL, but none of them are geared to make nice-looking and user-friendly URLs.
So enter DecentURL.com.
If you just type in a URL, it automatically generates the decent URL from the page’s <title>. Or you can type in your own if you want it exactly right.
One of the bad things about services like TinyURL is that people can easily point you to nasty sites without you knowing it — the URLs are just http://tinyurl.com/x8vz or whatever. But DecentURL always includes the domain in the URL to avoid this problem.
It was quite a lot of fun to make. I wrote it in Python using web.py and mod_wsgi.
Feel free to contact me with feedback or feature requests.