Simple random short URL creator

Download: http://www.matthewhipkin.co.uk/programs/shorturl.zip

To use this script, you will need:

• A web server with mod_rewrite enabled
• PHP & MySQL
• The ability to create .htaccess files within your webspace
• A [short] domain name

First thing to do is setup the MySQL database. The following SQL is enough to store the generated URLs.

CREATE TABLE `short_urls` (
 `id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
 `shorturl` varchar(10) NOT NULL,
 `longurl` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
 `deleted` int(1) NOT NULL,
 UNIQUE KEY `id` (`id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 ;

Secondly edit database.inc.php to your needs.

<?php
 mysql_connect("localhost","YOUR_USERNAME","YOUR_PASSWORD");
 mysql_select_db("YOUR_DBNAME");
 $siteURL = "http://yoursite.co/"; // Make sure you include the trailing slash
?>

Finally we need to create .htaccess.

RewriteEngine on
# Include any STATIC redirects before this line
RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z0-9-]+)?$ /shorten.php?page=$1

Upload all the files to the root of the short domain's webspace and then call http://yourdomain.co/add.php?u=http://www.somelongdomain.com/somelongpath/somelongfilename.html from your browser, this should display a short randomised URL in your browser window, copy and paste this into your address bar to ensure it is working correctly.

As an anti-spam method I would recommend you rename add.php and shorten.php to something completely different (remembering to update the .htaccess file with the new names).

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