How I Shorten Links

One of the things I’ve obsessed about the most over the years is how I share links. I’ve always wanted a way to shorten links but have a way to control the whole thing myself and/or move to other systems when necessary.

For a while I use Adjix which I really liked and the idea was that I could take those links with me. This proved a great idea because the service disappeared and I was able to take my links with me.

by rolling my own solution this time - ShortenLinks

I have a Cloud Cannon site at http://links.cloudvent.net. This site is nothing but a bunch of folders that contain one index file that redirects to another URL. I also have an Apache2 server that redirects my short links to those cloud cannon pages. This allows me to add links from any of my computers where I have Dropbox installed without having to be logged in to the server.

Let’s look at an example.

Apache2 redirects http://07.bsoi.st to http://links.cloudvent.net/07

http://links.cloudvent.net/07/index.html redirect to http://what-if.xkcd.com/30/

If I were to try to make a short link for that URL again, my script would simple print http://07.bsoi.st so I could share the short link.

If I try to share a new link, linkit.py will …

• find an unused short string
• save that and the URL to the CSV file that keeps the history
• create the index.html page and folder in links.coudvent.net
• create the redirect rule and save it to a config file in links.cloudvent.net

I have a cron job ( grab_config.sh ) that runs as root on my server and looks for the config file and updates Apache accordingly.