YOURLS, Part 2

Posted on March 7, 2010
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OK, so it’s been a little longer than I thought it would be, but at least I’m getting around to finishing up the post about YOURLS. Half the time in the past, I’d say I’d write more about something, and then never do. If you haven’t read my intro blurb about it, you might want to, although it doesn’t really matter if you do or not.

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.

YOURLS, Part 1

Posted on February 20, 2010
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Last week I was bored, and usually that leads to me doing things I don’t really need to do. However, in this case it was something productive. I bought a six letter domain (tld included), and made it into a url shortening service. However, since my PHP skills are lacking (i.e. close to nothing, mostly borrowing from my experience with Java [which I am not as comfortable in as I should be]), I looked to the web for an answer. And on the first search result I clicked on, I found YOURLS. Perhaps the thing I liked most about this was that it was written by two WordPress plugin developers whose plugins I have used in the past. I also liked that there was a WordPress plugin for it as well (wasn’t really surprised to see that), which automatically gets a shortened url when you create a new page and/or post, and can post it on twitter for you.

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.

Please Ignore Me

Posted on February 20, 2010
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I have no problems writing posts to test things, and not deleting them. I hope this posts to the test twitter account…

Hello World! Out of The Ashes

Posted on February 15, 2010
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Yes, I’m using the default post title for an actual post. Not because I can’t think of one on my own, but because… yeah, it’s because it’s 00:53 here, I’m tired, and I can’t think of a title. Hey, look at that. Only half of the post title is the default first post title now. As I was writing the rest of the post and looking for an image to use, I thought of the phoenix, and got the idea for the title (and the theme of the post) from that.

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