Joe Hackman

Joe Hackman

Digital Transformation, Industry 4.0, Tesla, maker, and more...

You are here: Home / Archives for yourls

Save travel and searching time with a custom Traffic Map

by 3 Comments

DC Traffic

DC Traffic photo credit: Joe Shlabotnik

While spot checking traffic on Google Maps today I went to refresh the map I’d created and it disappeared. I then realized that you need to create a link using the Google maps interface in order to be able to refresh the window correctly. It dawned on me that others are encountering a similar issue and might find a simple effective link easier to use. This video demonstrates that and will save you travel and searching time. I’ve found that often here in the Bay Area you can save a lot of time by waiting 15-20 minutes especially coming out of peak times. I also will use the custom traffic map to decide which way to go depending on where the worst traffic is at the time. Hopefully this will also save you time.

More from the idea farm… what else can you do with this?

For starters you can use your URL shortener like mine to create a really simple link that you can reference at any time from any device (where you have not already bookmarked the link) For example I turned this messy link:


http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=37.589207,-122.140503&spn=0.582183,1.742706&z=10&layer=t

into this simple link:


http://msol.us/b

Email it to your smart phone
By emailing this link to your smart phone such as my Motorola Droid, you will be prompted to open it using either a browser or Google Maps. By selecting Google maps you will be able to quickly and easily view the map on your phone without fumbling around. You could also create and send a link to a friend or loved one travelling to the airport, etc. I ran into a similar situation several weeks ago when my Podcast guest @dcfemella was running late in DC traffic. I was able to relay a little bit of information to her. Next time I find myself in that situation, I will mail them a link to their smart phone.

Do you have other ideas about how you could re-purpose this Traffic Map link?

Howto create your own url shortening service (Video)

by 11 Comments

Earlier this week you might have read my post about why it might be time to create your own URL shortener. Today I am responding to several reader comments and providing a detailed video on how to do it. If you are looking to create your own URL shortening service you may want to watch both of the videos in this post, this video is simply a test drive of the URL shortening service interface. I suggest you watch this one and decide if it is worth the trouble, or if you’re already convinced just skip it and view the second video below.

If the service passed muster and has the features you need, you will want to make sure you meet some pre-requisite items:

  1. Hosting account somewhere that supports MySQL databases and PHP (almost every host does).
  2. Domain name (the shorter the better, in this case I use 0b0.us)
  3. FTP Client (I would recommend Filezilla to Windows users)
  4. Will power to carefully watch the video below and potentially adapt the procedures to your own hosting companies MySQL setup.

Now that you’ve covered the checklist and without further ado, the goods:

I would love to hear if you completed this process yourself, let me know how it worked out. If you still need help feel free to post your questions in the comments below.
YOURLS Logo

Why it might be time to host your own url shortener

by 31 Comments

Have you ever vested time and energy into something only to have someone else let you down and abandon, sell or give up on it? Not long ago I was a big advocate of drop.io I had used it extensively, became an affiliate, created youtube videos and much more. You might have read recently that drop.io was acquired by Facebook and will no longer be providing service effective December 15th of December 2010. This left me high and dry with a few clients, scrambling to fill the holes. Perhaps this is the same reason why many top new media advocates recommend that you control your “home base” wherever that might be. Note this candid advice from @Shonali Burke a friend of mine:

IMHO no matter how many changes Facebook makes, many of which can be great promotional tools for people as well as businesses, nothing can compare to having your own base on the web. That is the one place you “own,” which you don’t on Twitter, Facebook, Amplify, etc. As the old song goes, “they can’t take that away from me”…!

Home of bit.ly namespace declared unsafe

Shortly after that I was reading how .ly was owned by Libya and they are arbitrarily disconnecting some domains without so much as a bit of notice.  This is a problem for me because nearly all of my current shortened urls are stored on bit.ly using the main bit.ly domain. If for whatever reason or whimsical decisions Libya decides to kill bit.ly I would be in a world of hurt with hundreds of links orphaned. What happens when a domain name falls off the internet? Anything trying to access that website will probably end up on the now familiar Opendns page and not the website they had planned to access:

What you get when you access a non-existent domain

Joe’s own URL Shortener is born – msol.us

I decided to try to setup my own url shortener as a hedge against the possibility of orphaning a bunch of links. While doing research I came across a nice article on Lifehacker about how to create your own URL shortening service. Being a regular reader of the site, I knew that it was probably a quality solution so I tried it out. The shortest domain that I own is msol.us, one digit more than bit.ly not bad. Especially not bad considering 1 and 2 digit sub urls will be available (i.e. http://msol.us/ms goes to my company’s website, versus http://bit.ly/17CUAH on bit.ly saving 3 digits overall). As another example I also created a very simple shortened link for this article, it will forever be http://msol.us/1 which sure beats http://bit.ly/fwuIfe (the bit.ly equivalent).

DIY Difficulty level – Moderate

I would say creating your own url shortener site is not for the faint of heart. I would recommend it to people who are fairly tech savvy and have some under the hood understanding of mysql databases. While this article is not a how to, the one thing I would suggest to add to the Lifehacker article about YOURLS is that you should put the files in the root of the domain you want to use. I started using /urls sub directory and that added 5 digits to the shortened links. How often do you wish you had 5 more characters while posting to Twitter? I know I do quite often!

Adding my first url

I decided to make my company’s website the first url because I could use /ms and have a very tight/short url to use, here is a screenshot of the created link:

My first custom hosted url

Not unlike bit.ly I had the option to share and since I was authoring this post, I customized and tweeted it out:

My first tweeted custom shortened link

A James Brown Moment?

I am not dancing like James Brown singing “I feel good” but I am feeling quite comfortable that in addition to controlling my company website, dns and blog I also now control my own url shortener. Blame the IT control freak in me, but I would definitely recommend you consider bringing your url shortening in house. You will not have to worry about all your link assets being compromised.

A Word of Caution

It’s great to have your own url shortener but realize that you do need to backup and maintain it. There is a mysql database as well as some files that will need to be backed up periodically to protect this asset. If you fail to protect the asset you could end up orphaning all the links you created with it! The most important thing to do is to regularly backup the mysql database, here is an article that explains mysql backup methods. Another area of concern is if you do not setup the users and passwords your shortening service could be publicly accessed. Alternatively if you do not enable SSL your password could easily be compromised by a Firesheep user while accessing it at your local Starbucks.

Make this post better

I realize that this is a very important topic, what else would you also like to see on this topic? Here are some ideas I had, please vote for one or suggest your own via comments.

  1. A screencast of the full process start to finish.
  2. A tour of the YOURLS interface, capabilities.
  3. More on the “home base” concept, controlling your own/company presence online.
  4. Explain the technical challenges for SSL, Passwords and Backups more thoroughly.
  5. Something else? Leave a comment. Thank you!