NERD! Homepage

Archive for the ‘php’ Category

Using Twitter feeds to feed your Fever

Shaun Inman redefined the feed reader with his brilliant application Fever. The best thing about it, apart from the brilliant user interface, the beautiful layout, the usability, the feel of a native app, is the fact that you can actually use high volume feeds without reading them. The idea is that a link gets more interesting when more feeds link to it. So fever has this section called Heat where all these interesting articles are shown.
Get on with it!

A better small URL generator: fitting URL

The last few weeks I used my small URL generator a lot. I even bought a new, smaller, domain for it to make it a bit more useful. For Twitter it’s perfect. But when using it in e-mails I got some complaints. People are happy that all links are clickable (some mail programs cut of every line after an x-amount of characters, leaving many long URL’s unclickable) but there was no information about the link left in the new, small URL. So I decided to change the script.

Read how to make your URL’s fit your needs

Creating my own small URL generator

UPDATE: check out the extended version of this script: fitting URL.

Since I started twittering a few days ago, and Twitter allows just a few letters for each tweet, the need arose for a small URL generator, a service that replaces a long URL (like http://vasilis.nl/fotos/digitaal/kiki/kiki-2009/in-de-hangmat-05-09018.jpg/) with a small one (like http://vasilis.nl/a/6). I tried two services (tinyurl.com and tr.im) but both didn’t work as I wanted them to work, which is strange because I don’t want much. Fortunately I’m a nerd so I just wrote my own short URL service. I’ll explain what I did so you don’t have to figure out how to write your own. The other reason I write this blogpost is that I hope somebody will explain me if things can be done easier or more secure: I’m just googling for solutions, I’m no programmer. And I really hope that somebody with a math knob can help me count with the base 64 system I choose to use.

More on making your own tinyurl generator