Clearly, what every geek wants for his birthday is his own
personal url shortner (a la bit.ly) with the work "geek" in it. So
I got myself that for my birthday and I'm enjoying it greatly (even
though my birthday isn't until Saturday - shh!) It's http://geek.tl
- because I'm worth it.
Using my usual technique of jumping in and doing something
before I've researched it properly I have used http://yourls.org/ (It's got a
short url, how could it be bad?) It didn't really take a geek to
set it up - although as I'm running a Windows server I had to do a
bit of fiddling about to get it up and running (you lucky lucky
Apache guys can ignore some of this).
Here's wot I did to make it werk:
- Downloaded the source from the website.
- Uploaded them to my website without reading the
instructions.
- Wondered why it didn't work whilst muttering.
- Read the instructions.
- Added the config with the right values in the right place
(duh).
- Wondered why it didn't work whilst muttering slightly
louder.
- Read the bit about it not working on Windows servers.
- Swore at smart-arse Apache users.
- Set up http://www.isapirewrite.com/ to
make it work like it should.
- Edited the url rewriting ini a bit to make it do what I
want.
- I have an Uncle Bob!
Things I would like to do in future but will never
find the time:
- Add some sort of Url shortening automation to my Umbraco
stuff.
- Also have an image uploaded a la TwitPics.
- Write some Android Appage to use the API.
- Learn to beatbox.
- Visit my Uncle Bob.
It seems OK so far - the only thing I've noticed that is
decidedly different to bit.ly is that Twitter doesn't do the "look
ahead" so when you hover over the bit.ly url it tells you the full
url, whereas geek.tl doesn't - if anyone knows why that is, let me
know.
Why do we shorten our urls? Because we are communicating in ever
smaller shorter sentences due to lack of time and interest leading
ultimately to the destruction of our language and returning us to
communication in mono-syllables.
Duh.
If anyone wants their own url shortner (perhaps as a gift) I can
sort that out for you (I won't even charge you much). Just get in
touch.