Looking at this page I found it funny that they mentioned my site, but what was really depressing was that none of the other sites loaded anymore. Well, emoji.xyz may only host shortened links but it will remain up for the forseeable future.

As initially described in my blog post emoji.xyz was a fun side thing I did while I was working on a project that was based in nodejs. I do not care much for javascript and I have avoided updating the project because I did not want to delve back into it. The libraries I used were woefully out of date and I expected that continuing to run the service would eventually end up with some sort of exploit taking down my web host. However, trying to be as good of a netizen as I can be, I have implemented a way for the site to continue serving links that were already shortened. I’m updating the repository to include the script. I didn’t want the links to die even if I stopped running the app.

I have mixed feelings about the legacy of URL shorteners, but they were probably a mistake.