tecznotes

I've been watching the brewing energy around Kellan's rev=canonical mind-bomb from just last week. Les Orchard has this to say:

You guys are moving on this stuff too fast! Welcome to 2002, when lots of us had more spare time than employment and we deployed new crap like this on our blogs and sites daily.

I'm convinced.

One of the small tools that I think would make rev=canonical even more useful is a rapid, brainless way to create short URLs for any domain. It's possible, in a brief PHP script that only knows how to speak HTTP, to:

1. Redirect from short URLs to long URLs
2. Respond with a short URL for a given long URL
3. Add a new short URL for a given long URL

"teczno.com" is already a pretty minimal domain name, so I've gone and made a shortening service at "/s" that does all of the above for every page on this blog automatically, e.g. http://teczno.com/s/x for http://mike.teczno.com/notes/, http://teczno.com/s/47 for this post, and so on. Each time a page here is accessed, it calls home for a short URL and makes a new one if necessary, backed by a tiny, three-column MySQL database. The short URLs get longer as the database fills up.

I've put the whole thing on github, in the hopes that new clients in other languages might be written.

It's called "shlong". =)