TightURL - A PHP/MySQL-based Blind Redirection Service

 If you want or need to run your own version of TightURL, TinyURL, MakeAShorterLink, or Shorl, you've come to the right place. If you're running a redirector like lilURL and need some relief from phishing and spamming abuse, you've also come to the right place.

This is the homepage of the TightURL Project.  As explained on the homepage, TightURL takes a very long URL as input, and returns a very short URL within the TightURL namespace.  For example, this URL:

http://www.a-very-long-domain-name.example.com/~someoneshomedirectory/bleh/blah.html

Can be shortened down to something like:

http://tighturl.com/abcd

The URL returned by TightURL returns a HTTP Redirect to the browser, which causes it to load the original very long URL.  The primary purpose of TightURL is to allow people to shorten very long URLs that would otherwise wrap when pasted into e-mail messages.  URL wrapping in e-mail messages usually results in broken links.  The e-mail program will convert everything up to the end of the first line into a hyperlink, and the rest of the URL gets ignored.

Features of TightURL:

• Written in PHP, uses MySQL to store URL table. May be adapted in the future to allow use of PostgreSQL and SQLite also.
• Highly customizable by editing configuration variables and HTML templates.
• All browser output is template-based. (except the fatal error screens)
• Checks submitted and accepted URLs against SURBL and URIBL to prevent abuse by the Bad People of the Internet. Please consider making a donation to these well-run and important Internet resources.
• TightURL is Free Software, licensed under the GNU GPL.

Requirements:

Any LAMP server.

• Linux (or probably any of the BSDs)
• Apache Web Server, ability to edit httpd.conf or use .htaccess files.
• MySQL Database server
• PHP scripting language.

TightURL may also work on a WAMP (Windows/Apache/MySQL/PHP) server, but is untested on this platform. Please advise me if you have a working Windows TightURL service.

News:

2008-05-09: I have decided that clueless "good guys" are worse than the bad guys because the bad guys primarily hurt the stupid, while 4th-rate anti-abuse champions hurt me, people like me, and by extension, lots of other people. Sadly neither group is ever going to leave the Internet in peace, but for now, neither have I left. I am pleased to announce that a new version of TightURL will soon be released. Everything about it should be good news to existing users of the TightURL source code. Its features include bugfixes, performance improvements, a significantly beefed up anti-abuse system, an upgrade notification system, the TightURL library to ease creation of services using the TightURL code, an abuse flagging system to allow the public to report abuse and have it automatically handled by TightURL, and a preview function that shows what URL a given TightURL redirects to. The TightURL API is probably going to be removed, as continuing reflection leads to the continuing conclusion that an API would most likely be useful to those trying to abuse a TightURL service.

2007-12-28: Found out about lilURL, which wasn't posted on SourceForge until April 2005. I really don't find SourceForge's services terribly useful, but I think it's important to have your project there, so that people find your stuff. Had I found code for lilURL, I probably would have installed it insteal of writing TightURL. Anyway, the public installation of lilURL at http://kenmickles.com/lilurl/ claims to have fallen prey to spammers, (and suggests tinyurl <- sadness) which certainly comes as no surprise to me. It is said that any idiot can write a redirector in a few lines of Perl/PHP/Python. I was the proof of that. The bulk of the work beyond that easily implemented functionality is in the anti-abuse protection, as abuse continues to be a major problem, and has turned something that should be simple into an ongoing production, not unlike all other forms of Internet abuse.

2005-12-24: TightURL still has not been officially tested on a WAMP server, but I have a report indicating that it works.

Project Status:

Nightly tarballs (when produced) will be found at:  http://tighturl.com/sourcecode .  The testing version of TightURL corresponds to the developer's code in sourcecode, and is used to produce any nightly tarballs.  The testing version has its own database, and will frequently be wiped out and recreated with no prior notice.

REMEMBER:Nightly tarballs are simply a snapshot of the developer's version of TightURL taken at a random moment in time. This version is not guaranteed to work at any given time.

An alpha version, TightURL v.0.1.2  has been released on December 3, 2004.  Your feedback will help improve TightURL.
An alpha version, TightURL v.0.1 was been released on Tuesday, December 2, 2004.

Please keep in mind "alpha" software is not considered bug-free.  There are no (verified) known bugs though.

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