The install process was easy, just download and unzip the zipped file, and upload it to the server. Create the database, and edit & rename the config file with the correct information.  Run the install script, and that was it. Using it to create a shortened URL was easy too, just fill in the url, hit OK, and out came a short url.

The only place I ran into trouble was viewing the stats, and having the shortened url bring me to the site. After working on it for a bit, I figured something must have been wrong, so I deleted everything and started again. It still didn’t work, so I had to figure out where the issue was. Eventually I narrowed it down to a specific item, but couldn’t figure out why I was having an issue. After doing a few other things to see if it worked, I chatted with my host for a bit, and he was able to figure out the issue:  some GeoIP methods were already compiled into the PHP set up, so it was trying to redeclare them in YOURLS. Since error reporting is apparently suppressed in YOURLS, I wasn’t being shown the errors. (Aside: it looks like they reworked something in the latest version, because an PHP parse error did show up when I updated today.)

However, my host knows what he is doing, and knew how to get around that. And I learned something new that day: while ssh’d in, just do php filename.php, and watch it spit out the errors. So after that, he just wrapped the functions with a check to ignore if they were already defined, and everything worked fine.

One of the main reasons I chose YOURLS is that there is also a WordPress plugin that when you create a new post (and/or page, if you so desire) will automagically shorten the post’s url, and post it to your twitter account. Now, sometimes I’m not a fan of those things, especially when people do a lot of posts a day, or in a short time span. That’s not me though, and I’m lucky if I write one post a week; I figure the people following me on twitter can survive the one extra tweet per week, especially since I don’t tweet all that often.

If people are looking for a url shortener that they wish to use themselves, I would recommend YOURLS, especially if the person uses a self-hosted installation of WordPress.

I do plan on talking about how easy and simple it is to use, but it’s currently 02:22, and I’m ready for bed. However, if I didn’t take the 10 minutes to post this little blurb, I probably would not get around to doing a proper post on it. Part 2 of this will probably be posted tomorrow (today really), but maybe the day after.

This isn’t my first blog, and I doubt it will be my last.  After about 4.5  years, my other site had gotten to the point where I no longer knew what was on it. I knew that there were some things that I no longer wanted public on it, but I didn’t want to go through and take out the old posts (besides, the amount of spam I was getting on that domain had made the primary email address next to useless). So I reduced the site to metaphoric ashes, and am now rebuilding from them. I will be going through the posts from the old site, seeing which ones can/should be republished; I know there are some. But the majority of them will probably remain offline, known only to myself.

Although this transition has been in the works for over a month, I haven’t really done anything until now. Life has been busy, and that’s prevented me from doing things such as working on sites. I have a few plugins that I’d like to install on here, and other that I still need to find where they are so I can download them again.  I also have another site in the works, and that might take a little time to get how I want it as well. But since none of the sites I own are run to get me money, I’m just fine with taking my time on them.

Image Source : Wikimedia Commons