Cory Bohon

I wanted to post a quick update about the Two Weeks, Two Open Source Projects post that I wrote earlier this week.

The first of the open source projects that I set out to create is for the most part done. I actually finished earlier than I thought I would, and it didn’t take as much programming time and effort as I first thought. I will be posting more about this project a little later, when I’m able to get the code completely finalized and uploaded to my server and create a wiki for the project.

Basically, Linkr allows you to shorten a URL (or create a redirect URL) right from your own server. So, you could point to a very long URL (for example the one to this post: http://corybohon.com/2010/05/two-weeks-two-open-source-projects/) from a much shorter URL that’s easy to share (for example: corybohon.com/linkr/?id=22). Obviously, if you had the software installed in the root directory, the URL would be much, much shorter.

Since Tuesday, I’ve been able to write over 530 lines of code that will do this task. The software is very basic at it’s core, written using PHP, MySQL, and HTML. There’s a back-end admin panel that will allow an administrator to configure URL redirects and manage users. The front-end is rather basic, allowing you to briefly see the name of the website you’re being redirected to before being whisked off to that site. You can see the front-end interface here: http://corybohon.com/linkr/.

There are still some bugs that I need to work out, but I will release the code for everyone to play around with this weekend. Be sure to check back. I should have the beta up at the very latest on Sunday night.

Tagged Code, Linkr, MySQL, Open Source, PHP, Redirecting, URL