personal / tool / archived
MiniURL
A 2005 PHP/MySQL URL-shortener script I packaged as MiniURL v1.0.
- BPM
- 128
- GRADE
- B
- LEVEL
- 4
- RELEASES
- 0
- YEARS
- 2005–2005
MiniURL v1.0
In September 2005 TinyURL already existed, and the problem was simple: long links with querystrings broke when they wrapped in an email or a forum post.
So I wrote MiniURL in an afternoon. PHP and MySQL, a table of codes and destinations, insert on submit, look up and redirect on hit. It shipped as MiniURL v1.0 in a zip, which was how I released things that year.
Later I ran one at jmp2.net, with a domain picked to be short enough that the short links were short, right before Twitter made link shorteners a big deal. This 2005 script was the first version of that idea.