Archive for April, 2005

in which I write my own version of tinyURL for the hell of it

Sunday, April 10th, 2005
On a text based bbs that I frequent, someone posted a URL so long that it spanned 4 lines. I didn’t even bother looking at it because that would have entailed copying and pasting the 4 lines separately into my web browser’s location field. Someone later posted a tinyurl version of it to the bbs.

In case you’re wondering what I’m talking about, tinyurl is a site that lets you create really short URLs that will then redirect to the original longer URL.

I posted that I thought tinyURL was a great way to go for URLs on the bbs. Several people responded that they don’t like tinyURL for a number of reasons:

  1. They don’t know what a link is before they click on it — it could be a porn site for all they know.
  2. They never know before clicking a link whether it’s work-safe or not — goes along with reason #1
  3. They can’t get to tinyURL from work — maybe the router at their workplace blocks the site for some reason?
I figured it’d be easy to write a script that does the same sort of thing as tinyURL, but adds features that these bbs users would want. I haven’t done any web development for a while, and figured writing my own tinyURL alternative would be a fun exercise.

So I fired up emacs, dusted off my mysql server, apache, and php processes, and got to work. The result: xiaoURL. Using xiaoURL is a more complicated process than tinyURL — xiaoURL doesn’t automatically forward users to the longer URL’d website, but instead shows a page of information on the site and provides a link for them to click. This is what people in the industry would call increased “friction” in the user experience, but it’s the best way to deal with the needs of these particular bbs users. Feel free to use it if you like.

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