* Robby Russell (robby / planetargon.com) wrote:

> I felt like giving myself a small project to get my feet a bit more wet
> with a small project in Rails
> 
> http://www.robbyonrails.com/articles/read/7

In my case qurl was a small project to get a bit more used to writing
web applications in Ruby/FCGI.  I've found it very fast and reliable;
Ruby seems very well suited to running daemonized applications, which is
a breath of fresh air next to PHP appservers which like to leak until
they explode, despite not maintaining any state to speak of across
requests.

I'm just mapping qurl strings to table ID's using base63 ([0-9a-zA-Z]).
This keeps the mapping as dense as possible (up to 4000 URLs with
2 characters, over quarter of a million with 3), at the expense of
predictability (which can be avoided by randomizing allocation within a
sensible range, but I don't really see the point).

Next step is to optionally generate a link ID which is easy to give to
someone verbally.  I have some pronouncable-password generation code
somewhere, maybe that could help...

If qurl is down, btw, it's probably because the server is getting
senile.  It "lost" the network interface a few days ago and needed
rebooting, which is occasionally decides to do on its own.

> resulted in having this up a few hours later:
> 
> http://rubyurl.com/

Nice.  It doesn't seem to like data: URI's (Application Error); qurl
allows for pretty freeform URLs up to 64k, letting you "link" to things
like: http://qurl.net/27 (non-IE users only).

> *be gentle..* :-)

Damn, *aborts DDoS tests* ;)

-- 
Thomas 'Freaky' Hurst
    http://hur.st/