Rewriter
I’ve been thinking in the past to create my own little applications for my own organisation and as a tool suite. The first one to come out is (surprisingly) not a todo app, but a URL shortener/bookmark manager. Check it out: Rewriter.
Rewriter is dead easy to use:
- Create your account
- Enter a url you want to shorten/bookmark in the box
- Click ‘shorten’ to bookmark and shorten it
And that’s it! You now have accessible anywhere all the bookmarks you want to use and share using a short url.
For example, this blog post’s url is http://ekynoxe.com/rewriter. After bookmarking/shortening it with rewriter, it now simply is http://ekx.im/O That makes it easy to share in an email, on Facebook or on Twitter.
You do not need to be logged in to access a short url, so it makes perfect to share them with friends and the world!
Things to come include an API to integrate the bookmarks with your favourite browsers (and for you to do many more wonderful things!); some sharing functions to enable you to share your short urls on twitter, facebook, other social networks and emails; and “maybe” it will be made available without logging in, if I manage to understand what would be the legal implications of doing so…
It’s also hosted on github at http://ekx.im/7 so if you’re interested in seeing/using the code, have fun!
Rewriter uses Rails 3 and Ruby 1.9.2, and at present it’s hosted on the excellent heroku.com
comments
IvanDM Wed, 27 Apr 2011 - 18:06
AMAZING! Add to your TODO list (if not already there): 1) Ensure that the "href" field after generated the link points to your service, not to the final URL 2) Add a "share" button to the page the user sees after generation, to quickly publicise the link (use AddThis - it's really good http://www.addthis.com/) Keep up the good work mate ;)
Matt Thu, 28 Apr 2011 - 15:21
Hey Ivan, Thanks for the feedback. Your first point is now covered and deployed. The sharing capability is on the list of many things to do and will indeed be added in the near future! It's getting there!