Before you read further, I want to just say that I ran this idea by Corey, just to make sure it wasn't too crazy (I've long since given up trying not to be weird). So if this entry makes you think I'm going insane, I blame Corey.

For some reason tonight, I thought it'd be hilarious to prevent Tabulas users from ever using tinyurl.com in their entries. (I really hope I wake up tomorrow morning thinking it's as funny as it is to me tonight). I just imagined some spammers trying to hide their sites behind TinyURLs, and discovering they kept getting converted to their real equivalents.

After seeing the best website idea of 2008 (they launched the last week of '08) in longurlplease.com, I decided this would be worth the twenty minute investment. Over the weekend, I had added code inside Tabulas to do link parsing of entries (on save) for some new features, so it was relatively trivial for me to add a little hook that would convert the links to their non-tinyurl equivalents (using longurlplease.com's API). 

So basically, any time you try to use a tinyurl in a Tabulas entry, I'll magically convert it to the real URL. This is a pretty jerk-ish thing to do (I'm generally very against ever touching a user's content), but I'm just too tired and grouchy to care today. Plus I think it's hilarious.

I've posted a screencast of it in action at http://screencast.com/t/oOsZtUf8Jth

Why I hate TinyURL as a service can be saved for another post.