Dec/090
YOURLS – Your Own URL Shortener
Everybody is getting a URL shortener these days. Google (Goo.gl), YouTube (YouTu.be), Facebook (Fb.me) and other sites have found the needs to brand their own links. It got me thinking, what would my URL be if I had my own shortener? How hard is it to setup one?
Well, the choice was obvious for me. My last name happens to make a great shortening service (NUS). The last two letters of my name are U and S. It just so happens that the .us domain is very popular because it stands for "United States". Since nobody adheres to what the actual domains are used for I quickly moved on to what the first part of the domain would be. After trying "pn.us" and failing, I resorted to having my full name as the URL of choice. After a quick check to see if it was available, I was registering the domain quickly thereafter. The URL pauln.us was born and ready for implementation.
A quick Google search of URL shortening installations lead me to YOURLS, which stands for Your Own URL Shortener. Installation of this PHP/MySQL application was VERY EASY. I created its own MySQL database through my web host provider and ran through the quick install provided by YOURLS and I was on my way. A alteration of the config and .htaccess files was pretty much all that was needed. I found some other URL shortening services but found that this particular application was quick to install, quick to use, and had some pretty neat statistical additions as well.
So, what would your URL shortening domain be?
