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.
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Issue 172/2015
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