RouTo is a simple and free url shortening / redirection service that has a few attractive and easy to remember short domains along with some neat little features
for now, only gol.im addresses can be kept indefinitely, others have a max life of 7 days - this limit used to be 3 days and is likely to continue to increase over time as the project matures
reference: we call the characters at the end of a RouTo redirect address the tag (e.g. "donate" is the tag in rou.to/donate)
trick: append ?i after the tag of a RouTo redirect address to inspect it before clicking through (e.g. rou.to/donate?i)
trick: prefix the tag in a RouTo redirect address with $ to treat the tag as a stock symbol and redirect to information about it (e.g. rou.to/$qcln)
tool: pre-check the safety of an address via rou.to/check - this check is automatically performed in the background during redirect creation and also intermittently when redirects are accessed
design: standard auto-generated tag length is 3 characters (2 letters and a number), but the length increases as necessary when auto-generation of a shorter tag is taking too long
design: tag auto-generation uses lowercase letters and avoids ascending and descending letters (like b,f,g) in order to give addresses a cleaner look
design: tag auto-generation avoids numbers that could be mistaken as letters (like 0,1,5) in order to aid visualization
feature: beyond some of our own internal safety checks, we also check target URLs (those that we've been asked to shorten / redirect to) against Google Safe Browsing before creating a redirect to them. those safety checks are also intermittently repeated on existing redirects in case they are later determined to be unsafe
disclaimers / terms
use of RouTo for or with relation to illegal/malicious activity or content is prohibited
the owners/administrators of RouTo are not responsible for external content linked or redirected to via RouTo domains (rou.to, punt.to, and gol.im)
addresses may be deactivated and/or deleted at the administrators' discretion, without notice
this is a small and experimental project. it is not an official service at this time
no guarantees are made about availability, security, or privacy