Aaron Toponce

If you're an IRC junkie, and spend hours a day in Irssi, then this post might be useful to you.

It's all the rage these days to shorten URLs with fancy URL shortening services. Heck, even I have one. They are certainly nice to have, when links are exceptionally long, such as search result URLs, and just the mere wrapping from one line to the next breaks the URL (not to mention, any additional characters added in the line break, such as spaces, other characters, etc.). I've used, and still use, link shortening services for IM, IRC, email, Identi.ca, Twitter, etc., only when I suspect the link could break as a result of line wrapping. I use them sparingly, and only use them if they provide a preview feature, giving the link to the preview.

While they have their advantages, they certainly come with a cost. Link rot is a very real concern, should the link shortening service go offline. You can nest shortened links in each other, concealing JavaScript/CSS mouse hovers. They can contain all sorts of nasties, and you don't know what you're getting into, unless you use some sort of software to expand the URL for you, before you actually follow the link. I've already blogged about using a simple shell function to expand shortened URLs (post at http://pthree.org/2011/10/18/use-wget1-to-expand-shortened-urls/). Well, now it's time for Irssi to automatically provide the function for me.

Presenting https://github.com/jcande/Expand-URLs. This is a simple Irssi script that will identify URLs in a given notice, whether in private or in public, and expand them using the http://longurl.org service (I think a patch for doing the lookup without a 3rd party should probably be submitted, as any 3rd party expanding service might go offline).

For me, this script is exceptionally valuable, because I connect to a local Bitlbee instance with Irssi, and use Bitlbee to connect to Twitter. Unfortunately, Twitter wants to track your clicks with their http://t.co service. Every link longer than 19 characters (20 for HTTPS) submitted to Twitter is automatically shortened with this wrapper. They claim that the service is to identify malicious links, and prevent them from being posted, should one be identified. But certainly, a company the size of Twitter can do so much more with this new "service". They could track what links are clicked and when. They can use this information to identify what stuff you're interested in, and when you use the service. They can track who clicks the link by IP or ISP. Of course, it would be foolish to not sell this information to advertisers, to target additional advertising on Twitter or other sites, based on this info.

At any event, this is one of the few Irssi scripts that I find really, really useful for day-to-day. It makes the Twitter timeline a bit chatty, now that lengthy URLs are being shown, and a few break due to line wrapping. And that is a pain, no doubt. But, the vast majority of links don't break, and it's nice seeing where I'll be taken when visiting the link. Keeping Twitter from tracking me, despite the occasional link breakage, is worth it.

P.S.: There is also a WeeChat script at http://www.weechat.org/files/scripts/expand_url.pl.