TinyUrl clone

posted in programming by jon on 2007-07-10

Yesterday, while listening to lugradio, I heard Aq mention someone creating a tinyurl clone that allowed you to specify your own link "handle" to reference the url (tinyurl uses a random alphanumeric id). That got me thinking about the usefulness of having my own personal url aliasing service. I use del.icio.us to manage my bookmarks, but I can definitely see the use-case for named, shortcut bookmarks for things of particular interest.

My second thought was how trivial this would be to implement in django. Result: 44 lines of code and 75 lines of html later, and I have my own tinyurl service. You can see the working implementation here (disclaimer: don't assume it's remotely bug-free, secure, or well implemented.)

the model 

from django.db import models

class Link(models.Model):
    handle = models.CharField(maxlength=255,unique=True)
    url = models.CharField(maxlength=255)

    def __str__(self):
        return self.handle

    class Admin:
        pass

The views 

from django.http import HttpResponse, HttpResponseRedirect, Http404, HttpResponseNotFound
from django.shortcuts import render_to_response, get_object_or_404
from django.newforms import form_for_model
from django.utils import simplejson
from jonallie.tinylink.models import Link

def index(request):   
 LinkForm = form_for_model(Link)
    message = ""
    if request.method == 'POST':
        form = LinkForm(request.POST)
        if form.is_valid():
            form.save()
            message = "Form saved: access your new link at http://jonallie.com/tinylink/go/%s" % form.data['handle']
            form = LinkForm()
        else:
            message = "Form NOT saved. Check errors below"
    else:
        form = LinkForm()
    return render_to_response('tinylink/index.html',{'form':form,'message':message})
            
def redirect(request,link_handle):   
    link = get_object_or_404(Link, handle=link_handle)
    return HttpResponseRedirect(link.url)
    
def check_handle(request,link_handle):  
    link = get_object_or_404(Link,handle=link_handle)
    return HttpResponse(simplejson.dumps({'handle':link.handle}), mimetype='application/javascript')

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