https://url-bin.herokuapp.com/about
- Type what you want others to see
- Share the generated url instantaneously
- Shared bins will never stop working and
cannot be taken downfunction as long as this site is trusted and extant - No dependencies
- No signups
- No tracking
- No hosting
- No cost
- No commitment
As hinted by its name, URLBIN works by storing the entire contents of a web page in the URL.
Thus, as long as the URL exists, so does the page it points to. The rest of the URLBIN program is responsible for translating between bin text and an "encoded" URL.
- The
/newpage encodes user-created bin texts as a link that can be shared
When the shared bin is visited, the data is encoded in the URL using base 64
encoding via JavaScript's atob and btoa functions in conjunction with its
encodeURIComponent and decodeURIComponent functions. The encoded data is
stored in the
hash
portion of the URL.
In the /new page, data is similarly encoded, except that the text is stored in one object that is converted to a
JSON string before being base 64 encoded.
The obvious downside of URLBIN is that the links get very long very quickly. Luckily, some URL shorteners are able to accommodate fairly long URLs (shoutout to TinyUrl). In a strange way, this effectively means the link shortener is acting as the web host since it is responsible for storing the record of the bin's text.
Storing so much data in URLs are definitely not how things on the web were meant to be done, so don't be surprised if trying to use URLBIN causes unexpected issues. For example, sharing these links may cause chat programs, email clients, and unsuspecting individuals to get confused, raise exceptions, or complain. Likewise, copy-pasting these links may take a long time, if it works at all.
Based on a project by @jstrieb, called URL Pages (Source code). The core components of this project: api, b64 and editor are based on his work.
Even though I didn't copy any of their code the interface is highly inspired from Hastebin