I released an updated version of ShortURL, nothing new really except more unit tests, refactored some code, I am now using URI.extract to get URLs instead of regular expressions (suggested by Marcel Molina Jr.) and I wrapped the HTTP code in an exception block, so when a network-related exception occurs (page not found, etc.), you get nil instead of a big mean exception. I uploaded the new gem too, so just type gem update to get the new version, or gem install -r shorturl if you didn't have it yet.