The tr.im url shortening service announced that it may be going out of business.  This was a big shock to people who use the service.  It means that all tr.im urls could be dead after December 2009.  Broken links represent more than lost information, they can result in lost business, and so it’s important to think of contingency plans when it comes to your use of short urls.

While I recommend that each business setup its own url shortening service, there is a quick way to place a buffer between the links that you share and the shortening service that you use; create a short url translator. 

A short url translator is a small file on your site that looks like a shortening service.  Instead of keeping track of shortened urls, however, it simply redirects requests for links to the url shortening service of your choice.  You don’t share links directly from your url shortening service, you share links that pass through your translator.  These links won’t be as short as the links from your short url service, but sometimes shorter is good enough.

For example, let’s say you have a long url:

http://mydomain.com/marketing/brochure/thisisthebestbrochure.htm

Typically, you would shorten the link above on tinyurl.com to something like this:

http://tinyurl.com/8dn35

 

With the translator, rather than sending your customers the tiny url, you send them this link:

http://short.mydomain.com/8dn35

 

When your customer clicks on the link (http://short.mydomain.com/8dn35) your site will translate that link to http://tinyurl.com/8dn35 and they’ll be redirected to your brochure as if they had used the tiny url directly.

Now, the protection lies in your ability to control the destination for the original link.  If tiny url is no longer available (God forbid), your clients would be stuck with a dead link.  However, because you sent out this link http://short.mydomain.com/8dn35, you can do some additional programming on your site to redirect the link to the correct page.

This solution assumes that tiny url will continue to be fine and that you’ll only have to make any changes in an emergency.  If you still have big concerns, then I really suggest you write your own service so that you control the entire process.

I’ve included the code below for a short url translator.  Give it a try.  I’d love to hear your suggestions and concerns.

<?php
/*
* @package ShortUrl Translator
* @author Shannon Whitley
* @copyright Whitley Media
* @license GNU/GPL Version 2
* This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
* modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License
* as published by the Free Software Foundation; version 2 of the License.
*/
/********************************************************************************

Usage:  Use the code from a short url service as the
        last parameter when calling this page.

	Example:  

        http://{your website}/shorturl.php/unicycles will redirect
        to http://tinyurl.com/unicycles

        You can add a subdomain and implement url rewriting to create this:

            http://short.{your website}/unicycles

********************************************************************************/

$shorturl = '';
$shortcode = '';

/********************************************************************************
** Insert your favorite short url service.
** The format is assumed to be:  http://{short url svc}/{code}
********************************************************************************/
$shorturlsvc = 'http://tinyurl.com/';
/********************************************************************************/

$urlParts = explode('/', $_SERVER["PHP_SELF"] );

//Example:  http://{your website}/shorturl.php/unicycles
if(count($urlParts) == 3)
{
	$shortcode = $urlParts[2];
}

//Redirect to the short url service.
if(strlen($shortcode) > 0)
{
	$shorturl = $shorturlsvc . $shortcode;
        header( 'Location: ' . $shorturl );
}
else
{
        header( 'Location: /');
}

?>