OneAndOneIs2

If you spend much time chatting online, you'll have encountered URLs that are far too long to be nice in a conversation. It's nice to have an alternative, and that's what tinyurl.com and other such services do - give them a long URL, and they give you a short one that redirects to the original.

Very nice.. but a bit tedious. Instead of

• copy
• paste
• done

You have to mess around with

• copy
• go to tinyurl.com - manually or via bookmark...
• select text box
• paste
• submit
• select new url
• copy
• paste

Meh.

What you REALLY want is to press a button and it magically just does everything for you. And since the motto of Perl is "Making the easy things easy and the hard things possible" I figured it must be do-able, and in fact somebody else must have already done almost all the work for me.

I was right. The Perl module "Clipboard" and the 'curl' command-line app were all I needed to use Google's API to shorten URLs using the http://goo.gl service.

So now I have a keyboard shortcut to run a script. The script gets the URL from the clipboard, submits it to goo.gl, gets back the new short redirect, and copies it into the clipboard so I can paste it.

In other words, the new flow is:

• copy
• shortcut
• paste

Job done!

It's useful enough to me that I thought I'd shunt it online in case anyone else wanted it. So here you go!

Follow up:


#!/usr/bin/perl
# Take URL from clipboard & copy smaller redirect URL to clipboard

use strict;
use warnings;
use Clipboard;

# Ugly fixify of cliboard order
if ('Clipboard::Xclip' eq $Clipboard::driver) {
no warnings 'redefine'; *Clipboard::Xclip::all_selections = sub {
qw(clipboard primary buffer secondary)
};
}

# Get the long URL from cliboard
my $url = Clipboard->paste;

# Get short URL via curl
my $short_url = qx#curl -s -d'&url=$url' http://goo.gl/api/url#;

# Returns in the format {"short_url":"http://goo.gl/xxxx","added_to_history":false}
# Crop out everything but the URL
$short_url =~ s#^.*goo.gl([^"]+).*#http://goo.gl$1#;

# Put the short URL onto the clipboard so we can paste it
Clipboard->copy($short_url);