mholt

Hi,

I am making a short URL service (ZSR.us).

How do I do it? lol

Thanks,
-Matt

cbr600

Ok, heres an idea ,

if you want to have it be like USER.zsr.us then you need to set up wildcard subdomains (Wild Card DNS i think its called) in Apache. Then you need to set up URL rewriting in the .htaccess file. And then foward USER.zsr.us to like zsr.us/url.php?id=USER. Then on url.php You need to query your db of the user's actual URL, then header foward to that URL.

Peter

All you need to do is get the URL the person wants a short link for, input that into the database along with a random unique string (you could use the id number that you would use in your database for the url but that could possibly start getting big, with unique random strings they at least can be used again when the old link is redundant and deleted)

Of course return the link to the person so they know what it is.

when someone clicks the link (which would obviously have a variable in it) you need to select the URL from the database (obviously after checking the variable has not been tampered with) and do a header redirect to the url you have just received from the DB.

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mholt

Thanks for the ideas!

Suppose I just want it to be accessable like zsr.us/idnumber

or,

zsr.us/sitename

How can I do THAT? What is URL rewriting with the .htaccess file?

Peter

you will only need that if it is going to be as a subdomain.

i suppose the easiest way as mentioned in my previous post would be to insert the url into the database. The table would have a id number (auto increment) and url. When you have inserted the url retrieve the id number for that url and return that to the customer as part of the url.
????: NamePros.com http://www.namepros.com/programming/122623-short-url-service-how.html

if you want it just to be like zsr.us/idnumber as if it was another folder on your site then you will need to do some trickery such as a custom 404 page so when it fails it sees if the folder nane is ina format you would expect it to be in then use header redirect then if not then just throw a 404 page as ussual.

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