Automagically unpack shortened URLs

Bug #380842 reported by Chris Jones
60
This bug affects 14 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Gwibber
Triaged
Wishlist
Unassigned

Bug Description

Since Gwibber knows about a number of URL shortening services already, and user displays are generally of a reasonable size, it's very nice to query the URL services for the original URL and replace the shortened one with that (asyncronously, so it doesn't make display any slower).
This can be extended further by showing twitpic (and other recognisable twitter picture hosting system) images inline.

Revision history for this message
Chris Jones (cmsj) wrote :

Marking as a wishlist.
I suggested this feature because LaTwit does it on my iPhone and it's very cool :)

Changed in gwibber:
importance: Undecided → Wishlist
Revision history for this message
Ryan Paul (segphault) wrote :

This is a really cool idea, but it's not practical to implement in Gwibber right now because of certain architectural limitations in the program. Gwibber currently pulls down the whole stream on every refresh rather than just grabbing the latest items. This means that we would have to expand all of those shortened URLs every single time or maintain an internal cache that matches short/long URLs.

This will be a lot easier to implement after I finish refactoring Gwibber to use an internal cache for all messages. At that point, we will be pulling down only the latest messages during every refresh, so the impact of doing this will be much less noticeable.

Changed in gwibber:
status: New → Triaged
Revision history for this message
Sean Murphy (seanmurphy) wrote :

I've been hoping for this feature for a while now. It'd be awesome if Gwibber used LongURL.org for this. IMHO the current architecture shouldn't be a problem since I'd recommend keeping a cache of short/long URLs anyway. The only potential problem I see with keeping a cache is the amount of memory it could use over an extended period of time, but I think that's an unlikely problem, and could be fixed by limiting the cache size allowed for this feature. Thoughts?

Revision history for this message
Ryan Paul (segphault) wrote :

@Sean: your LongURL.org service looks nice. I'll add this feature request to my list of things to do this weekend.

Changed in gwibber:
assignee: nobody → Ryan Paul (segphault)
Revision history for this message
Fernando Miguel (fernandomiguel) wrote : Re: [Bug 380842] Re: Automagically unpack shortened URLs

Olá Sean e a todos.

On Monday 01 June 2009 22:18:10 Sean Murphy wrote:
> I've been hoping for this feature for a while now. It'd be awesome if Gwibber used LongURL.org for this.

+1 from me.
I dislike shorturls too

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Revision history for this message
Andreas Schildbach (schildbach) wrote :

What a strange idea to use another "service" to resolve redirects.

Revision history for this message
axx (axx) wrote :

I might add that when repeating, the original notice should probably be preserved, short URL included. We don't really want to automatically have the short URL brought back to its full size then re-shortened, probably using a different service, or the short URL shortened again using a different service.

If we want to change URL shortening service in the repeated notice, we can always just paste the full URL in place and Gwibber will shorten it using the preferred service.

Just my 2 cents.

Revision history for this message
Tom Metro (tmetro+ubuntu) wrote :

Ryan Paul wrote on 2009-05-27:
> This means that we would have to expand all of those shortened URLs every single time...

Most shortened URLs will never be looked at (unless you are in the habit of clicking on all links in your feed), so why expend effort resolving them?

There is a simpler approach...expand the URL on demand, such as when the mouse hovers over the link, or expressly in response to a context menu option. (The hover approach would be preferable.)

Ryan Paul (segphault)
Changed in gwibber:
assignee: Ryan Paul (segphault) → nobody
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