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:
- Hosting account somewhere that supports MySQL databases and PHP (almost every host does).
- Domain name (the shorter the better, in this case I use 0b0.us)
- FTP Client (I would recommend Filezilla to Windows users)
- 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.