As a weekend project, a buddy (@nogwater) and myself put together a little application. The main idea was create a simple URL shortener like so many others, but what we hadn’t seen along these lines was a self-destruction, limited use url redirector.
So we created Vapurl.com (vapor URL run together).
You can pick some number of uses and some amount of time, after which the url will simply take you to the vapurl main page.
Check it out and come up with interesting uses. Let me know what you come up. Ideas/Feature suggestions are always welcome.
Dad said
You might want to give an example of how this works and why someone should use it. I’ve no idea. Sorry.
jmlawlor said
Lets say you wanted to inspire your students to visit your web based course work site. 1 way to motivate them would be to tell them that a link to some resource was on that site that would only be temporarily available, therefore inspiring them to go after class and check the resource online. So instead of putting the normal link to the resource on your site, you would use this tool to create a temporary link to that resource, Set its expiration to 1 day and 100 visits and then post the VapURL link on your site. As students visited the link the uses would decrement and any students that hadn’t visited before the expiration date, wouldn’t have the advantage of the non-procrastinating students had.
Just one use case that comes to mine.
Seth Wisely said
Mmmmm power
uses: discouraging email tards from mashing FWD