Looking at URL Shorteners for AutoQA

[Tim Flink]

I spent some time this week evaluating 3 different URL shorteners for
use with AutoQA.
 - url-shortener (https://github.com/voidfiles/url-shortener)
 - TightURL (http://tighturl.com/project/p/tighturl/)
 - yourls (http://yourls.org/)

TL;DR version - I think that yourls would be the best choice for us. It
has an API that looks good, it is actively maintained and has features
that the others don't.

Right now, I only have these set up on a local dev machine. If there is
interest, I can try to get something that would be a little more
publicly visible.

Tim

============================================================
url-shortener (https://github.com/voidfiles/url-shortener)
 - Django based application
 - more recently updated fork of the original url-shortener
   * https://github.com/nileshk/url-shortener
============================================================

I didn't finish trying this one out mostly because of its dependencies.
It requires blueprint-css (a ruby based CSS framework) [1] to be
installed within its own directories. This would make packaging pretty
messy unless we did some code modifications to url-shortener to use a
common blueprint-css.

In addition to the dependency issue, there doesn't seem to be a whole
lot of documentation for the project and once I did get it running in
devel mode, its user interface was not incredibly intuitive.

Overall, it is written mostly in python but it seems to be rather dead
and I think that there are better options.

[1] https://github.com/joshuaclayton/blueprint-css/

============================================================
TightURL (http://tighturl.com/project/p/tighturl/)
 - Written in PHP
 - Deployed into production at http://tighturl.com/
============================================================

TightURL is a simple URL shortener written in PHP. It has been around
for a while, has a stable code base and has decent abuse protection.
The stable version hasn't been updated for a while but the developer is
keeping a devblog [2] that makes it look like the project is still
maintained.

The documentation is decent and there were no real surprises setting it
up. It has good support for templating and I don't think it would be
very hard to make it look more like part of Fedora or FedoraQA.

Unfortunately, there is no real API for shortening the URLS. It would
be possible to interface with the main page by scraping the content and
using the form, but that seems like a less-than-elegant way to do it
(not to mention being fragile and a pain).

[2] http://tighturl.com/project/devblog/

============================================================
yourls (http://yourls.org/)
 - Written in PHP
 - Deployments listed at http://yourls.org/#Showcase
 - Active development
============================================================

Yourls is an actively maintained, full-featured URL shortener written
in PHP. It has a documented API [1], support for requested shortcuts
(i.e. use http://short/myshortlink instead of forcing
http://short/alVYn), built in statistics and a plugin interface.

The documentation is decent and there were no big surprises on
installation.

The downside to yourls is that it would take some work if we wanted to
provide a public html interface or to customize the admin interface.
I'm not sure that we really want a public html interface since our use
case would be AutoQA only and having a config file based auto system
would be acceptable since we don't need many users.

[Tim Flink]

On Fri, 22 Jul 2011 09:56:18 -0600
Tim Flink <tflink(a)redhat.com&gt; wrote:

>  The downside to yourls is that it would take some work if we wanted
> to
>  provide a public html interface or to customize the admin interface.
>  I'm not sure that we really want a public html interface since our use
>  case would be AutoQA only and having a config file based auto system
>  would be acceptable since we don't need many users. 
That last sentance was supposed to say "having a config file based AUTH
system"

[Kamil Paral]

----- Original Message -----
>  I spent some time this week evaluating 3 different URL shorteners
> for
>  use with AutoQA.
>  - url-shortener (https://github.com/voidfiles/url-shortener)
>  - TightURL (http://tighturl.com/project/p/tighturl/)
>  - yourls (http://yourls.org/)
>  
>  TL;DR version - I think that yourls would be the best choice for us.
>  It
>  has an API that looks good, it is actively maintained and has features
>  that the others don't. 
Hello,

sounds great. Thanks for the work. I have just a single problem with yourls - I have no
idea how to pronounce it! :-)

[Tim Flink]

On Mon, 25 Jul 2011 11:23:44 -0400 (EDT)
Kamil Paral <kparal(a)redhat.com&gt; wrote:
>  Hello,
>  
>  sounds great. Thanks for the work. I have just a single problem with
>  yourls - I have no idea how to pronounce it! :-) 
Yeah, I'm not quite sure myself. Either your-elz or you-are-elz, I
think.

Either way, if that's the biggest issue that we hit, I'm happy :)

Tim

[Adam Williamson]

On Fri, 2011-07-22 at 09:56 -0600, Tim Flink wrote:
>  I spent some time this week evaluating 3 different URL shorteners
> for
>  use with AutoQA.
>   - url-shortener (https://github.com/voidfiles/url-shortener)
>   - TightURL (http://tighturl.com/project/p/tighturl/)
>   - yourls (http://yourls.org/)
>  
>  TL;DR version - I think that yourls would be the best choice for us. It
>  has an API that looks good, it is actively maintained and has features
>  that the others don't. 
Have you looked at http://ur1.ca/ ? I've seen quite a few F/OSS people
using it.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net

[Tim Flink]

On Tue, 26 Jul 2011 23:56:47 -0700
Adam Williamson <awilliam(a)redhat.com&gt; wrote:

>  On Fri, 2011-07-22 at 09:56 -0600, Tim Flink wrote:
>  > I spent some time this week evaluating 3 different URL shorteners
>  > for use with AutoQA.
>  >  - url-shortener (https://github.com/voidfiles/url-shortener)
>  >  - TightURL (http://tighturl.com/project/p/tighturl/)
>  >  - yourls (http://yourls.org/)
>  > 
>  > TL;DR version - I think that yourls would be the best choice for
>  > us. It has an API that looks good, it is actively maintained and
>  > has features that the others don't.
>  
>  Have you looked at http://ur1.ca/ ? I've seen quite a few F/OSS people
>  using it. 
ur1.ca is running lilURL which seems to be rather dead (last release
in 2005). Note that I'm talking about lilURL, not ur1.ca - I doubt
that ur1.ca is going anywhere in the near future.

I've nothing against ur1.ca but I think that we're leaning towards
setting up our own URL shortener so that it looks more like its from
Fedora QA and we don't have to worry about spam or throttling rules.

I'm all for more suggestions, though - I don't pretend to have found
every possible solution :)

Thanks,

Tim