Fry.IO - An ultra simple URL shortener | Hacker News Reader

Fry.IO - An ultra simple URL shortener

fry.io

10 pointsandyhmltn28 comments

You might want to put some sort of URL validation as at the moment it could be used to store other data.

Also by entering what I've put at http://hastebin.com/ruxixitunu I'm provided with http://fry.io/9m which returns a 502 Bad Gateway error from your nginx server (BUG?).

Also: http://fry.io/b2

I've added URL validation now. Apparently the way I was doing it before wasn't as robust as I would've hoped. Thanks!

There are a few bugs to iron out! I didn't anticipate that this submission would really get any views so it's in early development. Thanks for all the comments, I'll certainly take everything on board and work on it ASAP :-)

Just as a note, there's a feature that isn't really obvious yet. If you go to:

http://fry.io/8o/manage

(8o being your particular shortcode) it displays an analytics screen. I'm planning to improve this and add some kind of API.

Add spam filtering ASAP. In the past I had created a URL shortner, even created an API and the usage exploded but most of the links were created by spammers and I used to get regular warnings from my host. In the end I just shut the whole thing down. if you just want to shorten the links with your own short domain, better use bit.ly. They even have basic analytics and it's free.

bit.ly isn't an option as it's a side project haha. In terms of spam filtering, I haven't had any problems as of yet touch wood but I'll look out :-)

What's the use case for a URL shortener? I think the first time I heard about them, the pitch was to stop long URLs getting split over lines in Usenet messages; then they became popular because of Twitter's 140 character limit. But not very many people use Usenet now, and Twitter shortens URLs itself, so I'm not sure what people are using URL shorteners for now.

I see them in print newspapers and magazines to provide more information or sources.

I like them for sharing URLs on IRC. If they're too long, they can be hard to select in text clients like Irssi or WeeChat.

I made this one because I use it when posting articles. I think a small link looks a lot better than a large one. But I guess that's preference.

Simple.

To be ultra useful, add a "copy to clipboard" link, more spacing between the generated url and the search box, maybe wrap the generated url in a textbox, bigger font and more centered.

Thanks, will do!

One more feature suggestion: Let people customize the short code. That would be your USP. I can't get a preferred short code on more popular url shortner like bitly because chances are it's already taken. You can provide that.

Another: add password protection. Say I want to share my daughter's birthday photos with my friends, I can have a url like fry.io/{hername} and also have it password protected. That will add value over bitly or goo.gl.

Just my $0.02.

Useful, but just an observation do you think you actually need 9 JS files and 3 CSS for such a page? maybe you don't need all of them? or you can minify the JS into one file and use that?

That is very true. I'll get on that ASAP. I wanted to get something up as soon as I could so I used the 'FlatUI' template which seems to include a lot of that stuff.

Nice, always wanted to set up one of these for myself, but never found a good example. I'm wondering if you would like to tell us (me), what you used to set it up?

I'm not OP, but HTTP Headers show:

    X-Powered-By: Phusion Passenger (mod_rails/mod_rack) 3.0.19

So most likely a Ruby app, and probably not Rails as no asset pipeline has been used.

Looks like they're using Sinatra (http://www.sinatrarb.com/) if the above erroring pages are anything to go by (http://fry.io/b2).

Here is the start of some code. Wrote the core in 3 hours for a job interview. Python, GAE, Test Cases, UI and all of that. Have fun.

site - http://jjbshort.appspot.com/

source - https://github.com/joeblau/jjbshort

edit: I realize the URL's aren't short... the code just needs a short domain :)

Thanks! And thanks for the others that posted as well of course :)

It's a really simple sinatra app at the moment. I got the domain a few months ago thinking I would sell it on. But then I decided I wanted to start up a little project with it. :-)

Also, self-redirect bug: http://fry.io/bk

Hmm, thanks! That should be fixed from now on.

Is this site live with traceback enabled?

That was a rather stupid mistake on my part. The environment was wrong. Thanks!

... is it broken? Doesn't work for me.

How so? Everything is perfect on this end

Its not working

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