Making short urls
Contents |
What is a URL
A URL is a Uniform Resource Locator. It is what tells your computer how to find a website. Go to the short url page to start making your URLs.
What do I need
You don't need anything to start making short URLs on s5h.net.
http://www.example.com/Spam%20Filters:%20Do%20they%20work might become http://s5h.net/u?543fa or http://s5h.net/u543fa
Why is this useful
There are many times when one might find this useful, such as sending a friend a URL via a mobile phone, where typing something lengthy could be difficult. There are times when the reader may not wish to copy-type a long URL either, again the mobile telephone is a good example, but other times such as leaving your personal web page address in your business card or in a newspaper add. Short URLs are used frequently in twitter feeds and facebook status updates.
Where do I go
Simply go to the short url page to enter your long URL and get a short version to use in your marketing media or twitter feeds.
What else is there
Well, since 2010-06-02 I've decided to allow people to manage the short URLs once they're created within an account. Functionality will follow! This has positives and negatives. Firstly this adds a little bit of load to the back-end, secondly it might make some people feel like there is some impact on privacy. In reality There is nothing lost in privacy since things can be logged anyway. All this allows is for the person who creates the link to see when and where it is followed from. This is primarily since some data might get lost in the redirect, should you want to retain that.
Automation
Simply use the querystring url to define the value you want in your short URL. The short URL will be given in the X-SHORTURL response header and in the response itself if you want to page scrape but don't hold me responsible if I change the layout and text of that in the future!
example usage
GET /make_url.php?url=http://www.yahoo.com/ HTTP/1.1 Host:s5h.net HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Tue, 18 May 2010 19:33:39 GMT Server: Apache/2.2.9 (Debian) PHP/5.2.6-1+lenny8 with Suhosin-Patch X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.6-1+lenny8 X-SHORTURL: http://s5h.net/u10f Vary: Accept-Encoding Content-Length: 936 Content-Type: text/html
As you can see the request above forms the basis of this automation. The X-SHORTURL will always be present in successful requests which create a short URL.
Inappropriate Usage
If you use this service to peddle illegal or adult material the links will most likely be removed as a result. I do not accept people using this service in such a manner as acceptable.
