ur.ly - Dang Short Urls Powered by Google App Engine
Google App Engine let's you build web apps that run on Google's infrastructure. What's the best way to get familiar with a new framework like this? Build something -- preferably something simple and useful, and that's what I set out to do.
I've played around in the URL-shortening space pioneered by TinyURL and understand the problem domain well. I've built a couple of these in PHP and Ruby (merb) and registered the ur.ly domain in September 2007 but never released anything. When GAE launched, memories of Steve Rubel's Could a Billion TinyURL's Go 404? post (hat tip to Dave Winer) echoed in my brain. Why not build a URL-shortener on GAE and let Google worry about scalability?
So I built ur.ly, a simple, super-scalable (thanks GAE), fast (yeah memcached) URL-shortening application. There's an API to make it easy to use and it's open source so you can play with the code or run your own.
Feedback anyone?
Ben Feldman said,
July 10, 2008 @ 7:04 am
Very cool, Adam. Just replaced my is.gd bookmarklet with ur.ly’s. Hopefully some apps will start offering ur.ly as an option to shorten URLs with.
David Podley said,
July 10, 2008 @ 9:43 am
Adam,
Nice. I couldn’t access the source code but it’s a great idea to put this on GAE. I tried it and got a ur.ly/t address. I feel so special being the 20th address to use it.
Dean said,
August 6, 2008 @ 11:04 pm
Nice work - intend to use it with mymapsmobile project
One issue though - can’t parse JSON API response, it’s missing a ” character. I’ve raised the defect, hope you’ll get a chance to fix it soon
Dean
adam said,
August 9, 2008 @ 7:07 pm
Dean - I fixed the problem in r4. Thanks for the report.
links for 2008-12-04 « Daily Links Posting said,
December 4, 2008 @ 5:02 am
[...] Adam Stiles » ur.ly - Dang Short Urls Powered by Google App Engine (tags: shorturl GAE) [...]
Hugo said,
January 30, 2009 @ 10:57 am
great work, great post! thanks for providing the source, its pretty slick! Kind regards
Chaz6 said,
June 7, 2009 @ 11:30 pm
Is it possible to make urly produce short URLs using unicode characters, like those on tinyarro.ws?
adam said,
June 9, 2009 @ 8:30 am
Chaz6 - at this point urly can’t make short URLs with unicode chars because we’re base62 encoding integers to act as our unique ids.
Bart Burkhardt said,
November 14, 2009 @ 5:15 pm
How did you find out what the A-records where? I’ve been searching all night for it and it seems GAE / Google Apps only supports CNAMES
Where did you find the IP Addresses?
Bart
adam said,
November 14, 2009 @ 5:45 pm
Bart - no idea on the IP addresses… perhaps a blog post, or perhaps Google had them documented a while back and only supports CNAMEs going forward. Sorry I don’t have a better answer for you.
Adam
wiibart.com » Blog Archive » I just comment on Google Issue 777 - Officially Support Naked Domains for GAE Apps - it’s insane that Google is ignoring this - bart burkhardt said,
November 15, 2009 @ 5:54 am
[...] services that run on GAE, like http://ur.ly Read about this great opensource project here: http://adamstiles.com/2008/07/urly-dang-short-urls-powered-by-google-app-engine/ Please also read this great article: No nudity please, we’re Google (or why you shouldn’t mix [...]
duduzerah said,
November 16, 2009 @ 7:47 am
Adam, how did you do the ur.ly have a “naked domain” through Google Apps and Appengine?
I think Google Apps doesn’t support this feature anymore right?
Thanks!
designcurve said,
December 2, 2009 @ 11:00 pm
Nice work! Simpler then my own Google App Engine URL Shortener:
* Service - http://my.loo.lu/url-shortener/
* Code - http://code.google.com/p/loolu/