Comments on: Geekout: How to Make Short URL’s

By: Bojan Babic

Bojan Babic — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 06:56:57 +0000

nice post but need algorithm optimization Bojan Babic

By: Danny Newman

Danny Newman — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

You rock!

Thanks again!

By: Rob

Rob — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Stan – you read my mind. I was going to approach this problem this week. This is cool.

By: Mark

Mark — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Thank you for this article. Users definately will benefit with this compilation of website and I will definately make good use of it.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Just give a try to http://www.stopurl.com

By: short url

short url — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Nice.. you can also try http://tubeurl.com

By: Derek Scruggs

Derek Scruggs — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s another approach that allows you to preserve some of the SEO juice. It doesn’t shorten the urls per se, just makes your web server more tolerant of long ones that are broken. Wouldn’t be too hard to adapt.

http://mttips.com/tolerate_broken_urls.html

By: Tom

Tom — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Very cool. Can you post the code for converting the URL back to a number?

By: stan

stan — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Oops! Should have included that in the original post. Here you go:

function convertURLcharsToNumber(URLstring) {

  // Standard unique chars valid in a URL path
  var chars = "0123456789" 
            + "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz"
            + "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ"
            + "$-_+*,|\^~`<#%/?@&";
            
  // These chars will not be recognized as part 
  // of URL by certain email clients (Outlook) 
  // if they are the last char in the URL.
  chars += "=:{}()[]'>,.!" + '"'; 
  
  var radix = chars.length;
  var number = 0;
  var slot = 0;
  
  while (URLstring.length > 0) {
    char = URLstring.slice(-1);
    number = number + (chars.indexOf(char) * Math.pow(radix,slot)) ;
    slot++;
    URLstring = URLstring.slice(0,-1);
  }
  
  return(number);
}

// Sample: This returns the original number, 399398203 
alert(convertURLcharsToNumber("5vOOv"));

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I tested this code, but i found if you do a loop from say 1m to 2m you will get clashes, which makes it kind of unsuable in its current form. shame!