URL Forwarding Service ?

URL Forwarding Service ?

by Chris Kenniburg -
Number of replies: 7
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Hello everyone,
I just got Mahara + Moodle setup and I will be encouraging students and staff to use Mahara "Views" to create homepages or classroom resource pages. What I don't like is the url it creates. Not very appealing when you have to put it out on a newsletter etc. So, I was thinking about running a URL forwarding service so that teachers could put their Mahara View (or Moodle blog/course) URL into this system and it makes it shorter and easier to type into a browser.

I have found these 2 scripts to run such a service: Phurl and plusPHP Short URL. They will do the job, but it appears that the URLs they create are a series of numbers and letters. Do you know of any other open source or free scripts that might allow you to enter keywords that are incorporated into the url? Then the url might look like http://mysite/biology instead of http://mysite/?324j6bb4.

Any suggestions is appreciated.

Thanks,
Chris

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In reply to Chris Kenniburg

Re: URL Forwarding Service ?

by Chris Kenniburg -
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Nevermind! I was able to find one and get it working. Now our teachers can convert those long big urls into something simpler with keywords. This will make it easier on the parents and students who type in the web addresses.
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In reply to Chris Kenniburg

Re: URL Forwarding Service ?

by A. T. Wyatt -
Greetings, Chris!

Could you please post your solution so that others can benefit?

Thanks,
atw
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In reply to A. T. Wyatt

Re: URL Forwarding Service ?

by Chris Kenniburg -
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I settled on the free version of the software found here:
http://plusphp.com/Pages/38/Free-Short-URL-Software/

Basically, our mahara install is called Community with links to "Views" created such as http://community.dearbornschools.org/view/view.php?id=1

With the new service our url is now much shorter such as
http://mysite.dearbornschools.org/?chris

I still have to figure out how to secure the index.php file so that not just anyone can create short URLs. That is the next step. I may just purchase the upgrade to this script for ~ $70 which has a registration system.

The free version is much simpler though.
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Re: URL Forwarding Service ?

by Chris Kenniburg -
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Can someone post code that would allow me to set a single password that would need to be entered into the form and then allow the user to create the short URL?
There is a PHP page that processes the form, but I am not a coder and do not know how to add the field "pass"to the code on the processing page in order to verify a single password.

Any help or suggestions would be great.
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In reply to Chris Kenniburg

Re: URL Forwarding Service ?

by Chris Kenniburg -
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I was able to modify some of the script so that it will only allow websites with dearbornschools.org in them. This should eliminate any of the abuse I could see coming from students entering myspace/youtube/objectionable content or anything like that.

Here is the finished service page...
http://mysite.dearbornschools.org/
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In reply to Chris Kenniburg

Re: URL Forwarding Service ?

by Chris Kenniburg -
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I can also provide all the files as a zip since they do not require a database to function. If anyone is interested?

I got the original script from phpplus.com which is free to download.

I guess contact me if you want the zip.
-Chris
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