How To Create Own Customized URL Shortening Service

Written by Pavan Kumar on August 20, 2009

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There are hundreds of URL shortening services available online today. Few of them among are very popular and have shortened millions of URLs and are doing their sincere job of shortening every hyperlink on the web. Though the credit of first popular service goes to TinyURL, Bit.ly is what the most popular one these days.

create url shortening service

Recently the web URL shortening service TR.IM shutdown made a more noise which we did not observe while the service was started 😉 There are other URL shortening services like IS.GD, RT.NU etc which have 5 characters in the entire domain name including TLD, these days we cannot trust any of them based on what happened with TR.IM.

Its a nice idea to start your own URL shortening service if you use such services heavily. Hoping you already have a domain / use a directory/sub-domain in your own domain all you might need is some webspace and a database. Customization is what you should think of if you are an expert – otherwise go with the free URL shortening scripts after reading their documentation about installation.

1. Yourls – Your Own URL Shortener and a WordPress plugin

Yourls - url shortening service scriptThe speciality of this is that you can have a wordpress plugin and use your own URL shortener to shorten URLs of your blog. If you write a new post / page on your blog, this plugin will automatically convert that link to your YOURL and post it directly to Twitter. You can download the script here. The official site is YOURLS.ORG which is not loading at the time of writing this.

2. Shorty – Shorter human readable links from long URLs

shorty to make short web urlsThe admin interface of this script is amazing and you will find it easy to use. You can access it here and also you can check out a live demo of the script on the same page before downloading.

3. Kissa.be URL shortener

Kissa - shorten url, text, image and emailThis is not exactly the URL shortner which you have always seen. It actually creates a page on its site which links to the url you submitted. This also shortens email, text and image. A user has to click twice in order to land on your page. Try it here.

Note that its wise not to use www for any url shortening service.

Also read: TinyURL and SEO, Register cheap domain for URL shortener, Find Twitter backlinks for websites

       

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3 Readers responded to this post

The scripts you mention are good. But if you really want to *create* your own URL shortening service, rather than simply *downloading* one, see my recent article:
http://sean-o.com/short-URL

@ Sean O

Thanks for your tutorial, stumbled it and will read it soon :)

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About The Author

    Pavan Kumar

    Pavan Kumar completed Engineering in Electronics and Communication in the year 2008. He is very enthusiastic and keen to work on different aspects of computer, internet and mobile related fields. The articles here reflect his creativity. This blog was started as a showcase of solutions for different problems and today it has got a good reputation in the blogosphere. Read More...

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