I get a lot of ideas. Most of them wander aimlessly in my head until they become obsolete, but once in a while I’ll get an idea that seems useful and simple enough to do in my free time.
If you’ve used Twitter, you’ve seen the myriad of url shortening services like TinyUrl and Bit.ly. Url shortening services are a kludge and they break one useful, built-in feature of the web, which is the ability to know where you’re going when you click a link.
So I thought, this is something that I could fix in an hour or so with a Greasemonkey script. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, Greasemonkey is a Firefox Plugin that runs in your browser and lets you run your own Javascript on pages you load. Greasemonkey comes with a handy-dandy AJAX function called GM_xmlhttpRequest.
I figured all I have to do is grab all the anchors on the page, see if they match a list of shortener urls, do an xmlhttpRequest for each one and grab the final location (after the service finishes with it’s redirecting) from the headers.
Something along these lines:
function getTargetUrl(short_url) {
GM_log('Getting '+short_url);
GM_xmlhttpRequest({
method: 'GET',
url: short_url,
headers: {
'User-agent': 'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible) Greasemonkey',
'Accept': 'text/html'
},
onload: function(responseDetails) {
GM_log('Done. Status ' + responseDetails.status +
' Text ' + responseDetails.statusText + '\n\n' +
' Headers:\n' + responseDetails.responseHeaders);
}
});
}