URL Shortener

I built my own URL shortener

Using php and mysql I created my own URL shortener. It uses google's oauth libraries to authenticate users for everyone to create their own short links.

The reason for this is that I wanted to easily be able to create my own shortened urls with custom names. Other free services exist but most short simple words are already taken. I decided to create my own URL shortener because of this and it would be something fun to do and learn.

It took me a while to figure out how oauth work but once I did, it ended up being a very seamless solution for users to log in and use it. I used this because I didn't want to have to manage user accounts on my end for security reasons. Creating the database to store the short links was easy but the interesting part came when I decided sometimes I didn't want to come up with a custom short link and just wanted a small auto generated string as the shortened url. I ended up going with a simple base 36 encoding of the auto incrementing id in the database. I chose base 36 because I wanted to include only lowercase letters and numbers. This allowed for small strings of random characters that are easy to share with others. Later on, I decided to use the angular javascript framework to allow for easy sorting of the list of your urls on the management page.