UPDATE: ‘Fatalis’ has pointed out in the comments that the POST should be made to http://goo.gl/api/url with User-agent set to ‘toolbar’. The code now works, Yay!
Google just announced their own URL shortening service. Their service can only be used from the toolbar or FeedBurner, and I don’t particularly like adding extra toolbars to my browser. Maybe I can figure out a way to use their service from the command line?
I downloaded the toolbar XPI, unzipped it and peeked inside. Horribly indented JS awaited me. Nothing jsbeautifier couldn’t fix though. Few minutes later, I arrived at this readable JS function:
var getUrlShorteningRequestParams = function (b) {
function c() {
for (var l = 0, m = 0; m 0 ? l : l + 4294967296);
for (var o = 0, n = false, p = m.length - 1; p >= 0; --p) {
var q = Number(m.charAt(p));
if (n) {
q *= 2;
o += Math.floor(q / 10) + q % 10
} else o += q;
n = !n
}
m = m = o % 10;
o = 0;
if (m != 0) {
o = 10 - m;
if (l.length % 2 == 1) {
if (o % 2 == 1) o += 9;
o /= 2
}
}
m = String(o);
m += l;
return l = m
}
function e(l) {
for (var m = 5381, o = 0; o < l.length; o++)
m = c(m << 5, m, l.charCodeAt(o));
return m
}
function f(l) {
for (var m = 0, o = 0; o < l.length; o++)
m = c(l.charCodeAt(o), m << 6, m << 16, -m);
return m
}
var i = e(b);
i = i >> 2 & 1073741823;
i = i >> 4 & 67108800 | i & 63;
i = i >> 4 & 4193280 | i & 1023;
i = i >> 4 & 245760 | i & 16383;
var h = f(b);
var k = (i >> 2 & 15) << 4 | h & 15;
k |= (i >> 6 & 15) << 12 | (h >> 8 & 15) << 8;
k |= (i >> 10 & 15) << 20 | (h >> 16 & 15) << 16;
k |= (i >> 14 & 15) << 28 | (h >> 24 & 15) << 24;
j = "7" + d(k);
i = "user=toolbar@google.com&url=";
i += encodeURIComponent(b);
i += "&auth_token=";
i += j;
return i
};
So, I call getUrlShorteningRequestParams("http://www.kix.in/"); to get "user=toolbar@google.com&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.kix.in%2F&auth_token=78925814685". I see in their code that they do a POST request to the service to obtain a JSON return value that would contain the short URL. I punch it in using cURL:
$ curl -v -d\ "user=toolbar@google.com&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.kix.in%2F&;\ auth_token=78925814685" http://goo.gl/ * About to connect() to goo.gl port 80 (#0) * Trying 74.125.19.102... connected * Connected to goo.gl (74.125.19.102) port 80 (#0) > POST / HTTP/1.1 > User-Agent: curl/7.19.7 (i386-apple-darwin10.2.0) libcurl/7.19.7 > Host: goo.gl > Accept: */* > Content-Length: 77 > Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded > < HTTP/1.1 405 HTTP method POST is not supported by this URL
Oops! Well, not really, the URL shortener from the toolbar doesn’t work either, I just get the full URL whenever I try to “share” something. Has anybody actually generated a real goo.gl short URL yet?
Their auth_token parameter seems completely superfluous to me as it is generated from the URL itself. Don’t we all know security by obscurity doesn’t work 
If that isn’t a list of heavyweight respectable computer scientists, I don’t know what is!
