Stephen Groom Music Producer? Poker Pro? Sports Bettor? Tune in next post to find out

URLshort Updates

Hello there,

I have been a busy boy today and as-promised, I have some [url=http://www.urlshort.com]URLshort[/url] related updates for you guys. The first thing I did today was put together a little logo image and a little bit of XHTML/CSS to come up with the first layout candidate for the [url=http://www.urlshort.com]URLshort[/url] main page. This is available [url=http://www.urlshort.com/index.html]over at urlshort[/url] for you all to see.

After this, I was pretty bamboozled as to how I was going to create my URL generator. I have been looking at TinyURL scripts' source code for days and none met what I needed. They all seemed to involve some use of a random string generator using rand() or mt_rand(). To me this seemed to waste a good amount of CPU time along with creating huge gaps in URL availability. I decided that I wanted my URLs to start at [b]a[/b], get to [b]9[/b] and then go to [b]aa[/b]. After much trial and error I have coded this with the help of [url=http://lilurl.sourceforge.net/]lilurl[/url] which I had a look at and borrowed it's ideas (but not its code) to make a generator of my own.

I have uploaded a little preview of how URLs will be generated and [url=http://www.urlshort.com/inc/inc.php]here it is[/url]! It shows 10,000 URLs and as you can see, there is no chance of us running out of short URLs with this formula!

Tomorrow I will be adding blacklists and hopefully deploying URLshort for the public so stay tuned!

Thanks
Stephen