Software Sunday – How to make your own URL shortener

Fetch-5

Software Sunday – How to make your own URL shortener

If you hang out on Twitter, you’ll quickly get used to seeing tweets that use a URL shortening service like t.co or bit.ly or tinyurl.com. These are basically redirector sites. Say if you have a really long URL, it may take up more space than you have available with a 140-character SMS service.

Of course, if you’re a big company like google or facebook, you may get your own shortener that hints at the original url, like goo.gl or fb.me. We post a bunch of links to twitter all the time, and we sometimes put URL’s on stuff so we thought it would be pretty cool to have our own shortener. That’s when we realized, hey we could get a .it (Italian) domain and have our shortener be adafru.it! We quickly registered it, and set out to install our own shortener…

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3 Comments

  1. The problem I have with all of these shorteners is that you never know where you are going. You could end up on any site after clicking the link. It could be full of malicious code or be inappropriate for the person clicking the link or the location they are clicking from (like work, school, etc.).

  2. @steve – that’s not correct for ours! with an adafru.it link you *always* know it’s *only* going to adafruit.

  3. Sorry. I’m not concerned about any that you use (adafru.it or otherwise). I trust you.

    It’s the “random” ones you find out there using tinyurl.com and bit.ly (for example) that I’m concerned about – the ones that anyone can use.

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