Minor tweak:
When clicking the input box, I'd like the ghost text, 'http://', to be removed. Since I've already copied the URL I want to make happy, when I paste it I produce: http://http://urltomakehappy.com, It'd be nice to not have to manually remove that first http://
First, I'm a big fan of your flagship product. I use it on my site and told most of the Upper East Side about the joy Cornify has brought into my life.
Second, can I get some account information - say, analytics when I create an account with happylink?
If I'm going to be spreading happiness, I want to measure it.
There's a meta keywords entry but no content. They're not that important nowadays, but you might as well fill it in.
You could do with a bookmarklet to make generating links easier.
Perhaps you could add a feature to allow URLs to be prefixed by http://hapylink.com/ to then change them into the final link. For example: http://hapylink.com/http://www.foxnews.com/ would return a page with the resulting Hapylink. Diggbar does it like this and makes it so easy to use.
Could you make the resulting links /slightly/ shorter (optionally, perhaps)? I'd like to use this on Twitter but Twitter would shorten (or at least truncate) these URLs again as they're a bit long, I think.
Thanks for the detailed suggestions, those are all good points. An api-type feature, like you are suggesting, is on the way, and the other suggestions are now on the list.
It's a nice idea, but please remove the background image, it makes my eyes bleed. Your main website at http://www.cornify.com/ has a much better design.
Frameworks? really? how about a list of positive words, string concatenation, a random number generator, and a hashtable to store the URLs and their short versions, possibly with persistence. Common Lisp hashtables are transparently persisted with Rucksack, Prevalence, BKNR, Elephant, cl-store, etc.
I use 'frameworks' as a handwavy term to encompass 'anything that means you don't need to spend days reinventing the wheel'. If the aforementioned Lisp utilities mean you can do that, then so be it.
Sorry, didn't mean to jump at it like that. It's just URL-shorteners have been annoying me lately. Just because they're easy to make doesn't mean you should; there is no hack value in them, as nothing new is there to be discovered and no new ground to break; and they have no business value, aside from being, potentially worth BILLIONS as an integral twitter utility for the next generation of enterprise web grids and semantic net appliances ..meh.
It's all good. Please keep in mind that Hapylink is not a url-shortener, but a url-happifier. Like you say, url-shortening is over crowded, so Hapylink focuses on more of a niche audience of users with unhappy links.
Did you miss Cornify on April 1st? Ahhhhh, kittens everywhere. One of them was constantly batting at a floating butterfly. You should be really sad you missed it. This will cheer you up:
"The first 500 registrants get a free dub sack! But wait...call now, and you'll get two, that's right, two dub sacks! That's a $60 value for two easy payments of $10!"