I guess I was just a little prescient back in 2011, when I wrote of URL-shortening services in a blog post, "let's not forget that these entities have a nasty tendency to vanish". Not that being prescient about the Big G end-of-lifing services is particularly visionary or difficult, tbh.
The post[1] was to publicise a small shortener I'd written for myself (Java/JSP solution) -- in many ways deficient and lacking all sorts of features (stats, UI) but it worked well enough for me for a time until I got lazy, got ill, and got rid of the server it was running on. But I was bang on-target about the likelihood of such things disappearing under the waves.
I guess it's time to dust it off[2], bring the codebase up to date and get it working again. I'm a bit doubtful about hosting it on, say... Google Compute free-tier or something... for who knows when /that/ service will get taken down.
[1] http://onemikro2nd.blogspot.co.za/2011/04/shrtn-url-shortene...