lessn and shorty – standalone host-your-own short-url services

http://get-shorty.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=21

http://ƨ.ws/shorty

http://www.subtraction.com/2006/01/17/get-shorty

http://www.subtraction.com/2006/08/24/announcing-s

lessn is very simple, you get one username / password and next to no interface – does have bookmarklet

shorty could give you multiple users (database allows for it); however, that part of the interface seems to be absent – +ve human-readable links; excluding backwards–s dot double–u ess

Looking at http://yourls.org/ too, how many different schemes does one need‽

Disconnected thoughts:

been playing with short url technologies, WordPress and the inevitable short domain names, IDNs that look cool / shorter.

Choices influenced by Zeldman’s “Shorten this” [http://zeldman.com/x/50] and the comments attached to it.

WordPress plug-ins for shorter links – short link, short url, la petite url [ or le petite url <sic>, «le petit url» might be correct, mais my GCSE French didn’t cover the web ].

causerelatedmarketing.co.uk – a mouthful (especially with yyyy/mm/slug on the end); crm♻.ws is much more manageable for 140 character stuff

♻ influenced by @daringfireball / John Gruber’s ✪df.ws – even went to the same registrar!

Initially set up shorturl (used exactly as Zeldman does, except under the default letter); with a single tweet to test.

l p u [1.06] : allows http:// in prefix, then prints that after blog’s domain leading to http://example.comhttp://short-domain.tld/ as prefix to short links – need to make $blogurl = ”; rather than get_bloginfo(‘siteurl’);

produces short links of definable length out of any of a-z, A-Z and 0-9 or a combination; these are generated at the point of a post’s publication, or alteration in the case that l p u [1.06] has been added to an existing self&ndash;hosted WordPress blog [ wordpress.com blogs get an auto-generated wp.me short link ]

short link works in a different way, making use of a post’s numeric ID as its short URL – this doesn’t require an existing post to be altered to be available

crm♻.ws is just an alias (ServerAlias, mod_vhost_alias) of causerelatedmarketing.co.uk

/domains/c/a/causerelatedmarketing.co.uk and
/domains/x/n/xn--crm-k05a.ws are both symbolic links to the same place in the filesystem, xn--crm-k05a.ws being the punycode representation

none really handle having a different domain for your short URLs very neatly without some hacking

WordPress plugins

ShortURL … return $shortlink; instead of return get_bloginfo(‘url’) . “/” . $shortlink;
.htaccess tweaked :
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^xn--crm-k05a\.ws$
RewriteRule ^u/([0-9]+)$ u.php?$1|$2
(adding RewriteCond)

PHP-centric tech., since I don’t grok perl, python, ruby

SQL ess cue ell [ sequel? ] – was listening to Sitepoint podcast …

Lots of .htaccess mod_rewrite hackery needed when a site reports itself as domain0.tld0 when visited at domain1.tld1; the judicious use of RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} certainly helps, especially when one filesystem is seen as different sites, subdirectories of the root; shopping.chrs.nl being a sibling of who-is.chrs.nl, itself an alias of domain0.tld0.

Twitter Blog plug-in hacked about so that la-petite-url links used instead of bit.ly – and since I didn’t have a recent enough php, json_decode() is missing… and the replacement function has output in the form of an array, not an object.