Enable mod_rewrite in APACHE

Code August 21st, 2009 by Shai Perednik

With all the commosion lately relating to tr.im’s closure and reopening most people are opting to setup their own shortning service.
There’s Lessn and Yours.  Both
I searched around but couldn’t get a clear answer that worked.

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


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Make Your Own URL Shortening Service [Feature]

My Clippings August 15th, 2009 by System

Automatically pulled from My Clippings on NewsGator Online

URL shortening services are ubiquitous on Twitter and other cramped online spaces. They won’t all last, as tr.im has demonstrated, and their shutdowns could annihilate your linking history. If you own a domain, though, you can host your own service.

Even if you consider the links you’ve shortened for Facebook, Twitter, IMs and other services to be just of-the-moment, nothing-serious items that aren’t worth backing up, leaving a host of dead links lingering around the net isn’t good for anybody, or anybody’s searches. There’s not a lot you can do about your already-posted social network links, but anyone who’s got $10 for a domain name registration, and a creative short URL idea, can host, monitor, and control their shortened links.

We’re going to run through a basic installation of Yourls, a server-based webapp that can run pretty much anywhere a WordPress installation can. There are lots of other options, which we’ll get to as well, but Yourls is a fairly smart and fast way to get up and running with your own URL shortener.

What you’ll need

  • Hosted or DIY server space: That space must be running at least PHP 4.3, MySQL 4.1, and with “mod_rewrite” enabled. In plain English, that’s most any mainstream web server an individual pays about $5/month to for basic hosting. For DIY server types, any installation of LAMP on Linux, WAMP on Windows, or MAMP on a Mac. If you’re going the DIY route with a Windows system, our guide to setting up and hosting a blog on your computer covers many of the basics of patching your own web-facing system together.
  • A domain name: You’ll preferably want something short, which can be difficult in the super-saturated .com/.biz/.net market. You might get inspired and lucky, but you also might need to pay just a bit more for an international top-level domain (TLD)—the part after the period, like .tv, .nl, and the like—which can cost between $15-$90. The URL used in the screenshots up top is an example, albeit not really feasible, unless I figure out how to buy a straight-up Nicaraguan TLD.
  • Access to your server files: Whether you use an FTP client (like one of our readers’ five picks), a command line, or your host’s web access, you’ll need to copy one folder over somewhere on your server.
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