We wanted to make shorten URLs with a custom domain name out there but didn't feel comfortable with the options. Lots of things services offered analytics we didn't care for or required a fee to do custom shortening.
We're big fans of Hover and one of their great services is free URL Forwarding, which we've been using via our custom domain, rbtry.co. However, creating short URLs is a manual process - generating hashes and then manually adding them to a Hover page can be time consuming.
So we thought we'd write our own.
Note that this takes advantage of an entirely undocumented Hover API and is subject to be shut down at any point in time. We don't offer any support. This is simply a tool we've found handy and wanted to share.
- Go to chrome://extensions/.
- Drag the CRX file in this repository into the window.
- Once installed, go to the options page. Add your domain in.
- Sign into Hover (if you aren't already), then click the link under domain ID. A JSON feed will appear. Locate the ID for the corresponding domain in the JSON feed. Save that into your options.
- Refresh the page to insure everything saved correctly.
Now you can safely shorten URLs!
- Initial version.