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Tiny URL… well.. a small URL anyway

19th May 2005, 06:51 pm

Holy crap, TinyURL is so cool. There’s even a dashboard widget for it. The only problem I ran into is that their server wasn’t allowing mysql connections to it. Hmm, bummer. This is a cool service, but.. what’s going on here? It’s a table of urls that they’re encoding some small key to relate to, so when you ping the tiny url, it says “you said ‘EHY54′… and my table says you wanted ‘http://www.google.com’… so here you go (redirect)”

Pretty cool. A very simple idea, but extremely useful. So useful, that I’ve come to rely on that kind of technology to be able to pass obnoxiously long URLs to gallery pages like this one:

http://sc-fa.com/blog/2008/07/06/steve-cooley-showing-at-workssan-jose/

which isn’t really all that obnoxious, but it sure looks like it when you pass it to someone in an email and the URL breaks because of the wordwrap or something. So, since tinyurl.com wasn’t returning URLs, I made my own small URL maker.

It’s basically three components: a DB table, a form to make ‘em small, and a landing page where the small urls turn into big ones. Now if I only had a short domain name..

HEY, I do! http://3rl.us

so, said large url turns into: http://3rl.us/e8c31 which is much smaller. :)

AND, I added a hit counter, so I can see how many times a URL has been pinged. Now all i gotta do is dive into the widget making world and make my own for my small url maker.

oh yeah! make your own small URL here: http://3rl.us

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WordPress database error: [You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 'WHERE 1=1 AND post_id = 1075 GROUP BY hit_date' at line 5]
SELECT SUM(hit_count) AS hits, hit_date FROM WHERE 1=1 AND post_id = 1075 GROUP BY hit_date


One Comment

  1. Terry Day:

    Thanks for being there., when I needed to paste a LARGE URL into an E-mail.

    20 November 2005, 5:14 pm