urlhero

URLHero

URLHero is a link resolver for current and defunct URL shorteners. It uses link mappings from URLTeam archives, dumps provided by shortener operators, and links captured by the Internet Archive.

Planned features

Downloader

• Automatically download and process daily URLTeam releases.
• Hopefully gain access to 301Works dumps.
• Switch to a torrent client that can scale to handle 1500 webseed items. anacrolix/torrent has less mature webseed support and is relatively slow. Transmission was unable to handle all torrents, in simple tests.
• Support Internet Archive API authentication. For example, URLTeamTorrentRelease2013July can only be downloaded when signed in.

Link resolver

• Create link resolving website and API.
• Create Web Extension that redirects dead short links using URLHero.
• Proxy unknown shortener requests and contribute back to URLTeam dataset.
• Possibly fork unshort.link.

Parsing

• Process URLTeam first-generation TinyBack releases.
• Write custom CSV parser for qr-cx datasets to handle unescaped quotes.
• Full BEACON format spec compliance.

Database

• Find a relational or key-value database with efficient compression.

Contributing

There are many ways to contribute:

• File an issue or PR to submit a feature or bug report.
• Send link mappings for a URL shortener that you operate or have archived.
• Join URLTeam and help us archive at-risk shorteners by running the terroroftinytown project in Docker or via the Archive Team Warrior.

If you want to get in touch, join the #urlteam channel on hackint or email me.

License

This project is made available under the Mozilla Public License.