Agreed, it is not the same, but I'm saying if I needed to resolve a shortened URL, I would do it myself instead of sending an HTTP request to you so that you can send an HTTP request on my behalf. At any rate, using your service would be slower because of the extra roundtrip, and more unreliable.
However, I appreciate your post for enlightening what modern Perl looks like. After a quick skim I thought I was looking at Rails.
One advantage of my "service" is that if the URL redirector goes down, you still have a chance at getting my cached copy.
The point of the article is not the service, but rather what the code looks like. Returning "Hello world" is almost as instructive, but not quite, so I chose a dumb example instead.
However, I appreciate your post for enlightening what modern Perl looks like. After a quick skim I thought I was looking at Rails.