URL Shortening Site

Question

I am working on a URL shortening site which uses PHP, MySQL and Apache. General idea of URL shortening as I look at open source projects: user gives a URL link and the syste

Answer 1

You can use bit.ly (twitter uses this). There are some APIs which you can use to call and fetch shortened URLs.

Also talk about shortening URLs, you can simply use a table like this

CREATE TABLE `urls` (
  `id` varchar(255) NOT NULL default '',
  `url` text NOT NULL default '',
  PRIMARY KEY  (`id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;

Where you can have the id (in base 36 to prevent exhaustion of 32 bit integers) to be the shortened id - http://host/?id

and when you call the URL http://host/?As2dD24B, it will look up the matching ID and URL, then redirects to the URL. simple?

Also keep in mind that you can expand your base 36. I am assuming that your base 36 is: a-z and 0-9. You can add in A-Z (another 26) and other symbols (such as ?,:*&^%$#@).