Muppy URL shortening

Feb 7, 2011 (about 1 year ago)

There must be hundreds of different URL shortening services in existence, but the other evening, I had a few hours to play with and I somehow decided that it might be fun to create my own personal URL shortening service.

I think the idea to do this probably seeded itself in my brain when I read ‘URL Shortening: Hashes In Practice’ on the Coding Horror blog. If anyone is interested in the mechanics of URL shortening (who could possibly not be?), it is a good read, with most of the really interesting content being produced by the commentators.

Anyhow, up until now, I had been using the ur1.ca service for my URL shortening needs. I now use muppy.org. It is not the shortest of domains, but I figure it will take a long time before it becomes impracticable to use for this purpose.

The code used for muppy.org is available here. It is derived in part from lilURL and is released under the GNU General Public License. It differs from lilURL in that it is designed to be used as personal URL shortener and therefore it does not produce a publicly accessible interface for creating short URLs, but must instead be accessed by an alternative method.

I do not foresee muppy setting the URL shortening world on fire, but coding it has been a fun distraction. I may think about adding more features at some point, but for the most part, I think I can cross URL shortening off my bucket list.

P.S. If anyone is interested, Muppy is also a Muppet. :)

Tagged with: muppy

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