Several times in the past I’ve considered building an open source program similar to TinyURL (with some improvements) for my own use. I think it would be especially handy as a way for me to link to other sites from my blog while keeping strict anti-spam measures in place (which sometimes whine about my own off-site links).
I can’t believe this hasn’t been done before as the code shouldn’t be that difficult. I did spend some time recently looking for starter code but didn’t quite come up with what I was looking for. Instead I found lists of simialr sites which don’t appear to use open source code either the notlong service has links to some of their competitors and the Perl Shorten library gives another list of such services. The closest I have come is this short url php script but I haven’t looked at the code yet and I’m tempted not too because I’m not thrilled with the way the short urls appear to be handled and there is no information about how the code is licensed. The last thing I want is to get caught up in a licensing battle like the SCO/IBM case.
If you know of any open source PHP/mySQL URL shortening projects please add a coment and share the wealth.
It appears my comment system is down right now and I haven’t had time to repair it but the follwoing comment was sent to me by HarleyQuine who wrote the short URL script I mentioned above.
-Ben