Well, honestly I am a megalomaniac, and all the most famous websites have an URL shortening service for their own service. Since (one day) FoOlRulez will be the biggest website evar, I thought… why not adding the short URL service early? Doing it was far harder than thinking of it.

You know, we aren’t using a LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP) server, but an Nginx powered server (LNMP sounds weird tho). This means most of the software needs some fix to work correctly, though it will work much faster. This means YOURLS, the software I intended to use, needed some fix as well.

For this fix, I had to find a solution, and I have found it here: 使用 Yourls 强化你的短网址系统 – Showfom’s Blog.
I have no idea what that URL says… but hey, I found the fix to make YOURLS work!

if (!-f $request_filename){
set $rule_0 1$rule_0;
}
if (!-d $request_filename){
set $rule_0 2$rule_0;
}
if ($rule_0 = "21"){
rewrite ^/([0-9a-z]+)/?$ /yourls-go.php?id=$1 last;
}

Gibberish? No this is the code you need to make it work in your Nginx installation! Paste it where you need it. If you don’t know how comment here and I’ll explain a bit further.

Anyway, this made everything work… a bit of styling of the homepage et voilà!

http://foolz.us

It works! I can’t believe it myself!

Let’s go a bit more indeep with YOURLS. This is a very complete script to make your own URL shortener, by:

• Lester Chan / @GamerZ on Twitter
• Ozh RICHARD / @Ozh on Twitter

I think they’re the same who made a few of the plugins I use in this WordPress blog (yeah they are). Anyway, this script is powerful enough to not leave you dry mouthed: you get an API to use the URL shortening service on your server from anywhere, the admin menu lets you control the tidbits you need (ok, most of the controls are via code, but it’s easily done with the explanations), the code has explanation for most of the lines – I in fact edited it to fit my needs better.

Best part of all, it comes with a WordPress plugin, that hooks to the shortening service and makes a short url for every post: even this one post has a shortening url. Then you get automatic submission of the post to Twitter after publishing. The button to submit to twitter on the top is my creation by using the functions (wordpress hooks) that YOURL for WordPress provides.

So I bought a short url domain: http://foolz.us. Most likely it does not work yet.

Random logo I made in 5 minutes.

Have you noticed websites like techcrunch having tcrn.ch as short url for personal purpose: I am trying to pull the same thing, not like I have any use for it, but just to experiment something new for the wonderful price of THREE DOLLARS. And what would you think about extra subdomains like cant.foolz.us… that as for now won’t work of course.

So I started testing a few piece of software (rather, scripts) yesterday. There are some that you can buy, but FoOls is cheap, so we work on open source. All of these need a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP… the most standard web server).

The first one I tried is rather simple to use and really anyone would be able to use it. Shorty needs just the database and a folder on the website to work, no further setups. Too bad that this comes with a price: the features are really limited, and only the administrator can use it. This is the ideal for who wants a really simple and quite solid system on the own website, but it’s good for nothing for someone who needs to implement it around the website, and let it be used by the public. What’s more, the updates are dead since 2006.

So I declare this script DISCARDED.

The next one I checked is TightURL.  Honestly, I dislike this kind of website from the beginning, and I never understand why so many open source websites have to be just HTML skeletons, as they make harder to find stuff. But over this, this script is surely better than Shorty, full of customization… via coding, making it good for use only to experienced developers. Now, I could work a bit and modify it so I could implement it, but how many headaches should I have over this? We’re bloggers (scanlators), so the most we want to retouch via coding is the style of our website!

Since I am kind of lazy (and scared) to go edit the code, I declare this script DISCARDED.

Another script I tried is Yourls. The webpage this time is that of a standard help for WordPress, which is nice, very human. This script seems to include what the two listed before have and more: it’s quite easy to use, the setup is nothing different than Shorty, yet, this time I can decide if I want a private short linker or a public one. The interface instead is still only text: it’s just an example over which one can style his own website, which is perfect, bloggers like to style the themes. The rest is taken care of through an admin panel, which gives pretty much all the control you need, unlike Shorty. But that’s not all: there’s an API that lets you implement the script anywhere from your website (think of having it automatic for twitter), and even a WordPress plugin able to give a short link to every post.

This is why I will use this last script, so, at least for now, it’s APPROVED.