"URL Shorteners" are really stupid. This isn't a blog post detailing why. Instead this is a blog post detailing my efforts to make the stupidest or maybe best URL shortener ever.

Essentially I take an input url and literally run it through some custom compression. This isn't any old compression algorithm though. Instead we use a massive dictionary compression algorithm. Each word in a large English (or combination of multiple languages depending on the audience) dictionary have been shortened to the smalled amount of bytes that can uniquely separate them from each other. This dictionary would also include many common "phrases" found in urls and maybe remove some too. Once the url has been compressed with this custom dictionary compressor it would be run through lzma to potentially make it a tad smaller. Then it would be a "base64web like" encoding with all possible url symbols (maybe even including ones which already have a defined use because if we're making a url shortener we're already clearly throwing standard to the wind."