dntd.cc URL Shortener Active

Last night I set up my new domain http://dntd.cc (it’s not very exciting if you visit it) to handle all my own URL redirections from now on. I’d been meaning to do this and in light of Tr.im’s imminent demise I thought it was prudent to go ahead and do it now. This is not (and will not become) a public service, it’s purely for my own use.

After looking around at some options, I settled on using YOURLS to power dntd.cc, for a couple of reasons:

1. It’s lightweight and pretty simple
2. It’s written by 2 people I know of, and respect, who are prominent members of the WordPress community
3. It comes with a companion plugin that allows me to automatically create short URLs for all of my WordPress Posts and Pages
4. I can also add arbitrary shortlinks using a very simple admin interface if I want to link to something else.

With all those benefits in mind, here’s what I had to do to get it running:

1. Register and set up dntd.cc, confirm that it was resolving and that I had access to that directory (long story, but this was more complicated than it should have been )
2. Copy all the YOURLS files into that directory
3. Create a new database to hold things
4. Set up the config file at /includes/config.php with your database details
5. Run the install script at /admin/install.php which gets YOURLS set up and installed
6. At this point you’d think you were ready to go, but I realized that I really needed to set up some Apache Rewrites and stuff to really have my site running. I removed these files:
   1. public-sample.php
   2. readme.html
   3. test-api.php
7. Then I dropped in this .htaccess file to handle redirecting shortlinks to where they need to go:

   RewriteEngine On
   RewriteBase /
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
   RewriteRule ([0-9a-zA-Z]+) yourls-go.php?id=$1
   
   Options -Indexes

8. Then I went ahead and grabbed the WordPress plugin for YOURLS and installed that, and configured it just to do these things:
   1. My own install,
   2. Local, on the same webserver (and entered the path to my config file)
   3. Skipped my Twitter login details and then set it to generate a short URL on Post and Page publish

Now, whenever I publish a new Post or Page, there’s a new box on the right of my edit screen that tells me my shiny new short URL. If I want to create my own shortlink for anything non-WordPress, I just log into the YOURLS admin interface and I can do so very quickly.