A smaller url

By Bobby Whitman

So I got this idea the other day when I noticed that tinyurl.com was one character longer than dynamit.us. Sure it is no is.gd, but tinyurl.com is a legit URL shortening service. So with a shorter URL, why not make my own such service using our dynamit.us domain. It certainly cannot hurt to have our website address floating around the web more frequently.

Taking a page out of Leah Culver’s playbook, I did just that. It is not quite as efficient since I am using base 36 instead of base 56 as Leah suggests. Since I wanted to whip this up quickly (only took me about 30 minutes to get it off the ground), I used PHP’s built-in base_convert function which only accommodates bases between 2 and 36.

Anyway, you can now shorten URLs on us by visiting http://dynamit.us/url.

I am working on some basic statistics for the usage. Any thoughts on what would be cool to track?

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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 5th, 2009 at 11:55 am and is filed under Tech, Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “A smaller url”

  1. Ryan Cook Says:
    March 5th, 2009 at 1:02 pm

    - Most popular base url being shortened.
    - Most popular destination url for the day/week/all time

    Those are my two suggestions.

  2. Introducing the dynamIt URL-shortening API | dynamIt blog Says:
    March 5th, 2010 at 10:54 am

    [...] dynamIt already has a URL shortener built into our site, all we needed was a suitable API. I was able to use the existing scripting to generate and store [...]

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