url-shortening
When I create an image using http://bayimg.com, I get a URL such as http://bayimg.com/NANmnAaCJ, and the image is hosted at http://image.bayimg.com/nanmnaacj.jpg.
I know that some URL shortening services use mixed case to get an extra 26 characters. However, that doesn't seem to be the case for bayimg.
Why is the URL in mixed case? Can I simply ignore the case and only keep the lowercase version (or is there some kind of hidden feature or future concern I need to worry about)?
This as called End-to-End (e2e) Domain configuration and is available to bit.ly Enterprise users only which costs $995 per month.
Rex Swain's HTTP Viewer isn't specifically for unshortening URLs, but is a general purpose tool to view what an HTTP request returns. It can be used to examine what a shortened URL will redirect to.
Unfurlr is an experimental service from MailChimp for untangling shortened URLs.
Where Does This Link Go is specially purposed for this, but doesn't provide as much information. It does, however, offer its code on GitHub. (h/t Dragomok)
Best Answer
bayimg.com is using lighthttpd to host its website. lighthttpd can be hosted both on Windows and Unix based operating systems. Typically for non Windows hosting, the case does matter. So 2 resources by 2 different URLs where only the case of the path differs could refer to 2 different resources.
Even if different case variations give you the same result, I'd not assume that they will always point to the same resource. Use the exact URL with casing that they give you.
You never know they may even have some computers hosting on Windows and others on a Unix based system. Maybe you just happen to hit one of their Windows servers via DNS load balancing.
There is mention in RFC1738 - Uniform Resource Locators (URL) that the scheme should be case insensitive (example: HTTP://), but there is no mention about the path of the URL, so don't assume 2 different cased URLs are the same, even if they happen to point to the same resource for you on your test.