Simple URL Shortening Solution Using Redirect Pages
Productivity Sauce
Using an application like YOURLS, you can host a link shortening solution on your own server. But if you need to maintain only a handful of shortened URLs, installing a full-blown URL shortening application is overkill. Instead, you can use a dead-simple solution based on HTML pages containing the REFRESH metatag. For example, to set up a shorter link to my Wikimedia Commons gallery, I created the following HTML file and saved it as a gallery page on my server:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <title>Redirect</title> <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:ListFiles/Dmitri_Popov"></head> <body> Redirecting... Click <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:ListFiles/Dmitri_Popov">here</a> if nothing happens. </body> </html>
Now, instead of typing the http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:ListFiles/Dmitri_Popov URL, I use a shorter one: dmpop.dyndns.org/gallery. Creating redirect pages manually can quickly become a nuisance, so I wrote a dead-simple shell script for that:
#!/bin/bash echo "Short name:" read shrt echo "URL:" read url cat redir.tmpl | sed 's/URL/'$url'/' > $shrt
The script uses the redir.tmpl file as a template, where the actual URLs are replaced by the URL placeholder.
comments powered by Disqus
Issue 200/2017
Buy this issue as a PDF
News
-
Trojan Turns Raspberry Pi into a Cryptocurrency Mining Device
Two trojans in the wild are targeting Linux machines.
-
Fedora 26 Beta Comes with New Features
The workstation comes with the latest Gnome desktop environment and support for many application build systems.
-
Raspberry Pi Foundation Merges with CoderDojo Foundation
The two foundations join forces to expand their efforts to reach young people.
-
Samba Security Hole Patched but Risk is Bigger
Millions of devices that use Samba Server are vulnerable to attacks.
-
Red Hat Announces OpenShift.io
Red Hat takes its IDE online.
-
Microsoft Bakes Linux into Windows Server
Microsoft is slowly becoming a Linux vendor.
-
Fearless Coyote, Linux Kernel 4.11 is Out
The new kernel makes swap implementation more scalable, which will help cloud providers.
-
Docker Appoints Steve Singh CEO
The new CEO comes from a very strong SaaS background.
-
Docker Announces Linux Kit and Moby Project
Both projects help organizations build their own containerized systems.
-
Ubuntu Returns to Gnome as Its Mobile Plans Shatter
Mark Shuttleworth has resumed the position of CEO of Canonical.