Build your own URL shortening service

Next time you follow a link to an article online, take a look at the address in your URL bar. Provided the browser you’re using doesn’t hide most of it, you’ll probably notice that the actual address is somewhere in the region of 70 to 100 characters long.

That’s not a problem when you’re copying into an email, or clicking from one site to another, but have you considered what happened if you’re reading over the phone to your nan? Or painstakingly copying it character for character from the glossy printed pages of your favourite Linux-centric (who’s that?–Ed) publication? It takes forever and one slip-up means that you have to start the entire thing again.

Keeping things simple

Here at Linux Format, we use the bit.ly service to shorten URLs for us. Feeding the full length address into the bit. ly site spits back a short, easy-to-remember string of characters. Typing that string into your browser results in you being redirected to the original URL from which the short string was generated.

As an example, if you put bit.ly/37Ws4y2 into your browser, you’ll be taken to the subscription page. That’s 99 characters condensed down to a mere 14, and if you already know that we use bit.ly, you