I’ve cleaned up the code, and feel that my ‘URL shortener’ redirect service is ready for general use! It is now configurable to use HTTP redirect headers, or meta tags, touts general compliance to smlnk’s former interface, and works with or without mod_rewrite for portability!

What’s the story? I got bored and decided to whip up one of those trivial URL redirect systems. It took about an hour. It’s quite simle to use, as well – to be redirected, for instance, http://holwegner.com/r/7w4jb9 is a quick redirect to an Amazon page featuring one of the new Intellivision games. It’s automagical – and moreover, it’s alot easier to cut and paste!

How do you use it? That’s quite easy, as well; for the full web interface, http://holwegner.com/r/ is certaintly the most user friendly – or if you want to automate it a bit, you can post your data to http://holwegner.com/a/$url – it will reply in plain text with your link, similar to how smlnk’s client did, although mine will accept URLs and the ID via GET or POST, I don’t really care which you use. ;)

If you want a javascript-able button, drag this to your menu bookmarks, then, when you want a tinier url, just click the shiny candy-like button.

Note that if you use the /a/$URLSTRING method, Apache strips anything that might be considered a post delimiter, so be sure to escape your path, and form a fully qualified URL (don’t to prepend http://, https://, or ftp:// – or it will be assumed to be http://)!