JTURL
Thursday, September 17, 2009 23:22:01
My newest reinvention of the wheel, named JTURL, has been released for beta testing. This application is a link-shortener, similar to bit.ly, TinyURL, and a few dozen others out there in the web. The goal is to take long URLs and shorten them into something considerably smaller, for a variety of uses, most notably services like Twitter.
This project has been an interesting experience for me, which is really what my goal was from the start. I don't want to compete with the big players out there, and don't want to make any money on this. Instead, like my other projects, most notably this blog, I'm doing it for the fun, and to gain experience doing things I haven't done before. For JTURL, I've had to learn a little bit about URL rewriting (using UrlRewriter.NET), and also some charting (using Google Charts).
I was incredibly impressed with how easy Google Charts is to work with. Obviously more advanced needs would benefit from a full reporting solution like Dundas or Microsoft Chart Controls. But Google's simple API allows you to define data, formatting, style, etc., all in a single URL, and it returns an image instantly. This met my current needs of a couple of simple bar charts, and if I add more charts in the future, I'm sure I'll be able to make it work with Google.
I ran into a few bumps in the road while working on this project. My hosting provider, GoDaddy, has a limit of just 200MB for SQL Server databases, which is ridiculously small, especially considering the fact that I have 150GB (750 times more) disk space for my website. I ran out of space with my other applications, so I had to find a different solution. After trying unsuccessfully to run SQLite and SQL Server Express from the website (GoDaddy claims it's possible, but won't offer any help, and I couldn't get any help from the community), I had to settle on {cough, hack} Microsoft Access. I'm not happy about it, but it's a simple database, and I think I can get away with it.
The second problem I had was with charting. GoDaddy only allows the web apps to run in Medium Trust, which unfortunately means that the two third-party solutions I started working with, Microsoft Chart Controls and WebChart both failed for security reasons. This was incredibly frustrating, but it did lead me to learn about Google Charts, which I'm very happy with.
The application itself is very simple - you plug in a URL, and it returns a short URL. You can define your own custom code if you want, otherwise you'll get the next four-character (case-sensitive) value from the queue. You can easily retrieve information about a link, which includes the long URL, total number of clicks, and charts of clicks in the last 30 days and 12 months, as well as the ability to download raw data of all clicks for your own analysis. The "About" page contains links that you can bookmark, so you can create short URLs on the fly simply by clicking a button on your bookmarks toolbar.
I'm hoping to add more features to this in the near future, including a user schema, which would allow you to log in and track the links that you created. In addition, I'd like to incorporate some of the security features found in the major services, such as checking links against blacklists.
Feel free to use this application, but I offer no guarantee of uptime, or that your data will be 100% permanent. I don't anticipate any problems, and don't plan on any outages lasting longer than a few minutes during production releases, but you probably shouldn't use this for official documents that require a permanent link or 100% stability. You should be just fine if you want to use this for personal Twitter-type links.
If you experience any problems of any kind, please take a minute to let me know. I'm considering this a beta release, so it's entirely possible that there may be some outstanding bugs to work out.
http://jturl.us/
Tags: programming social
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