With all the hullabaloo lately relating to tr.im‘s closure and reopening most people are opting to setup their own shortning service.

There’s Lessn and Yourls.  Both are great but Yours takes the cake for the admin panel and more detailed info.   I followed the LifeHacker Tutorial, but couldn’t get mod_rewrite working.  With the help of this post I figured it out.

change the following line in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default

 DocumentRoot /var/www/
        <Directory />
                Options FollowSymLinks
                AllowOverride all
        </Directory>
        <Directory /var/www/>
                Options FollowSymLinks
                AllowOverride all
                Order allow,deny
                allow from all
        </Directory>

then restart apache

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Theres also a bookmarklet for Yourls from twitter.com/jarbro but I’m still working on getting past the “Unknown” error.

UPDATE: The unknown error is normal.  You just need to drag the links to the bookmark bar.

I have to install php5-curl just to get the curl_init() function installed

sudo apt-get php5-curl

sudo  /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Hopefully this helps someone

Tags: apache, blockquote, Bookmarklet, CURL, IO, mod_rewrite, php, Sudo, tr.im, Ubuntu