One of my many many many faults is coming up with (in my blinkered eyes – good) ideas, thinking about them non-stop for 24hours, developing every little detail and aspect. Then spending a few hours doing some of the first things required. then getting bored and moving on to something else. Repeat ad nauseum.

Today’s brilliant plan (to take over the world)

Over the weekend it was ‘tinyurl.com’ services and specifically creating my own one.

I had been using is.gd almost non-stop all week, various things at work had meant sending out URLs to other people both formally and on services like twitter. Due to laziness it was nearly always easier to just make another shortURL for the real URL in question than to find the one I made earlier. It seemed a waste. One more short code used up when it was not really needed. The more slap-dash we are in needlessly creating short URLs, the quicker they become not-so-short URLs.

Creating my own one seemed like a fairly easy thing to do. Short domain name, bit of php or perl and a mysql database, create a bookmarklet button etc.

Developing the idea

But why would anyone use mine and not someone elses?

My mind went along the route of doing more with the data collected (compared to tinyurl.com and is.gd). I noticed that when a popular news item / website / viral come out, many people will be creating the same short URL (especially on twitter).

What if the service said how many – and who – had already shortened that URL. What if it made the list of all shortened URLs public (like the twitter homepage). The stats and information that could be produced with data about the urls being shortened, number of click throughs, etc, maybe even tags. Almost by accident I’m creating a bookmarking social networking site.

This would require the user to log in (where as most do not), not so good, but this would give it a slightly different edge to others, and help fight spam, and not so much of a problem if users only have to log in once.

I like getting all wrapped up in an idea as it allows me to bump in to things i would not otherwise. Like? like…

• This article runs through some of the current short URL services
• The last one it mentions is snurl.com, I had come across the name on Twitter, but had no idea it offers so much more, with click-thru stats and a record of the links you have shortened. It also has the domain name sn.im (.im being the isle of man). Looks excellent (but they stole some of my ideas!)

  

• Even though domains like is.gd clearly exist, it seems – from the domain registrars I tried – that you can not buy two digit .gd domains. though three letter ones seem to start from $25 a year.
• the .im domain looked like it could be good. But what to call any potential service??? Hang-on… what about tr.im! what a brilliant idea. fits. genius. Someone had, again, stolen my idea. besides, when I saw it could be several hundred pounds other top level domains started to look more attractive
• tr.im mentioned above, is a little like snurl.com. looks good, though mainly designed to work with twitter. Includes lots of stats. Both have a nice UI. Damn these people who steal my ideas and implement them far better than I ever could. :)
• Meanwhile…. Shortly is an app you can download yourself to run your own short url service.
• Oh and in terms of user authentication php user class seemed worth playing with.
• Writing the code seemed fairly easy, but how would I handle creating those short codes (the random digits after the domain name). They seem to increment while keeping as small as possible.
• Meanwhile I remember an old friend and colleague from Canterbury had written something like this years a go, and look! he had put the source code up as well.
• This was good simple perl, but I discovered that it just used hexadecimal numbers as the short codes, which themselves are just the hex version of the DB auto-increment id. nice and simple but would mean the codes become longer more quickly than other algorithms.
• I downloaded the script above and quickly got it working.
• I asked on twitter and got lots of help from bencc (who wrote the script above) and lescarr.
• Basically the path to go down was base64 (i.e. 64 dgits in a number system, instead of the usual 10), which was explained to me with the help of a awk script in a tweet. I got confused for a while as the only obvious base64 perl lib actually converts text/binary for MIME email, and created longer, not shorter, codes than the original (decimal) id numbers as created by the database.
• I did find a cpan perl module to convert decimal numbers to base64 called Math::BaseCnv. Which I was able to get working with ease.
• It didn’t take long to edit the script from Ben’s spod.cx site, and add the Base64 code so that it produced short codes using all lower case, upper case and numbers.
• you can see it yourself – if I haven’t broken it again – at http://u.nostuff.org/
• You can even add a bookmarklet button using this code
• Finally, something I should have done years a go, and setup mod_rewrite to make the links look nice, e.g. http://u.nostuff.org/3

So I haven’t built my (ahem, brilliant) idea. Of course the very things that would have made it different (openly showing what URLs have been bookmarked, by who, and how many click throughs, and tags) were the very thing that would make it time consuming. And sites like snurl.com and tr.im had already done such a good job.

So while I’m not ruling out creating my own really simple service (and infact u.nostuff.org already exists) and I learned about mod_rewrite, base64 on cpan, and a bunch of other stuff, the world is spared yet-another short URL service for the time being.