Nerd Post Alert: URL Shortening

August 22nd, 2009 | Filed under Blog, Rant, Technology

So, I get excited about web app setups and configurations from time to time, if for no other reason than that it tends to be a distraction that allows me to work the problem solving part of my brain. Now, almost every aspect of my professional life revolves around problem solving, however, this kind of thing ends up just being for fun and allows me to work the muscle without the strain or fatigue of real work.

In the tech press this week the world’s been all aflutter with stories about url shortening services shutting down and links to content being lost to the 404′d internet ether. After reading a few comments by Dave Winer, John Gruber, Matt Mullenweg and even the Buzz Out Loud Crew, I decided to look into how hard it would be to setup and configure my own custom url shortener. This is not because I think I’m operating at the same level as any of the above, but that I like to own my content. If this website is anything it’s an experiment for me to understand the inner workings of the web for users, content producers and media shops alike.

While I’m in no way a big name blogger, this site is a place for me to update friends, learn as well as promote myself and my work. If this website were to disappear tomorrow very few people would notice, and the web would just continue chugging along. This effect is multiplied even further when it comes to my use of short urls (like bit.ly, tinyurl.com or tr.im). No one cares if my short url links on twitter or facebook just stop working. But I care…and that’s what matters.

I can hear you saying Matt, you don’t have everything on this site under one roof, and that’s true. I used to locally host my own photos with open source software but I just gave up. The software wasn’t updated very consistently and there were many bugs. Eventually I just started using flickr.com full time…I even setup a paid account. I started embracing flickr with open arms due to the ability to upload and tweet photos to flickr from my iPhone with a combo of twitterrific and mobile fotos. I don’t own the urls where my photos live and any day Yahoo could just announce they are closing flickr and all my links and photos would go poof. The only solace I have that this won’t happen, like half the “free” web services out there, is that I’m paying for flickr. The chances of it disappearing, at least in my monkey brain, decrease dramatically when money changes hands.

So, after a little googling I came across an article by lifehacker discussing how to setup yourls.org on your own php server. Exactly what I was looking for. After only about 15-20 minutes of setup I was up and running. The bulk of the time was my hosting service updating the DNS records so that the mattkapp.net url was live and pointing at my server.

I’ve been testing this a little so you should be able to click this link (http://mattkapp.net/3) and it will take you to my flickr photos. Yourls will shorten any url I want and is protected behind a password so that spammers can’t take control of the url and blast out messages with my domain. Also it allows me to automatically tweet when I have updated a blog post to my twitter account. At first glance this feels a little spammy, however I don’t post all that often and I figure that if someone is following my tweets they’d be interested in my more long form ramblings.

So consider this post me planting my flag in the sand and controlling my content’s destiny; as well as a simple project to distract from all the 3D/Comp work I’ve been doing and a way to test out the shiny software I’ve discovered. Enjoy, and if anyone has trouble setting up thier own let me know and I’ll try to help.