zap.li aka INTURLR — Internationalized Non-Sanitizing Tiny Uniform Resource Locator Redirection
Although i secretly launched the site quite some time ago, my new just for fun project INTURLR aka the Internationalized Non-Sanitizing Tiny Uniform Resource Locator Redirection accessible at http://zap.li aparently needs some promotion.
Why did i do it?
Well, a certain someone registered the german umlaut domain sorry cannot display this here.de and just then realized that most web applications like for example various tinyurl redirection services are unable to cope with that kind of character gibberish. I tried several of those myself and was unable to find even a single one that does it alright so i thought i’d just try punching something up myself.
That however was not all that simple as i found out you cannot simply redirect to any URL someone punches in, you have to encode it to punycode because HTTP seems to be 7bit-clean for the header part. No i haven’t really looked into it at all, maybe i should. ;)
It’s written in Python Django and kept very simple for now.
Thats just about it. Maybe i’ll even add personalized accounts where you can avoid expiration of the redirection later, for now please do not hesitate to send feature requests.
