Build Your Own URL Shortener

By | August 5, 2009 | Software

4

ClampURL shorteners are all the rage—tinyurl.com, tr.im, ow.ly, bit.ly … even Digg are getting in on the action. But wouldn’t it be cool to write your own?

It turns out that doing so is not so hard. We’ve just published Kay Smoljak’s latest article Get Shorty: Trim the Fat with ColdFusion, which takes you step-by-step through the creation of a simple URL-shortening web app in ColdFusion 9. It also comes with a handy little quiz, sponsored by Adobe, to test your understanding of the tutorial.

Now hold your horses folks—we know ColdFusion isn’t for everyone. If ColdFusion isn’t your bag, or you reckon you can write this app in half the time in your favourite development platform, then that’s fantastic. But if you’re interested in reading about how to do it in a super elegant way using the ColdFusion Builder tool, then this is definitely the article for you. You might be surprised.

Check it out.

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Matthew Magain

Matthew Magain (@mattymcg) is a web and mobile designer from Melbourne who freelances under the name of Useractive. His latest project is UX mastery, an online training resource for user experience designers. He spends his spare time writing and illustrating children's books.

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{ 4 comments }

Sean O August 13, 2009 at 11:57 pm

It’s easy to build your own URL shortener. I recently posted an article on how to create one for your site / brand, using PHP & MySQL, in under 50 lines of code:

http://sean-o.com/short-URL

Matthew Magain August 7, 2009 at 3:26 pm

@I remember this: I’m not sure which it is that I’m more confused by — what it is you have against the concept of a URL shortener, or why you’re letting us know in an image.

I remember this August 7, 2009 at 6:10 am

http://i32.tinypic.com/eg7cbb.jpg – is there ?

mauteri August 6, 2009 at 3:14 am

i built one called eeny.me with php/mysql a few months back. one of the features is using your twitter handle in the subdomain (eg http://mauteri.eeny.me/1). haven’t done much with it since building it because i’ve been busy, so there are a few known bugs i still have to take care of. it works great for the most part though :-)

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