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Announcing Smurl - a free URL compressor

http://smurl.name

short-url-forwarder, smurl, smurls, smurl name, smurl.name, tinyurl.com, tinyurl

7^th of September 2005

Today I formally launch a new website: http://smurl.name

Smurl lets you generate aliases for looong URLs that you might want to paste into your emails (emails are often width-size limited) or SMS. Imagine sending this SMS to a friend:

 Hi mate. Pls check out my new flat on the net: 
 http://www.foxtons.co.uk/search?md5=908a5a01192
 c89ed37d7a3ed7edbcdb1&currency=UKP&search_form
 =map&search_type=SS&inst_ref=ir_myfr000056608&
 submit_type=search

which could with a Smurl name be shortened to:

 Hi mate. Pls check out my new flat on the net:
 http://smurl.name/9c

The bad news is that this hasn't been done before. The most famous "competitor" is probably tinyurl.com and my hope isn't to become the worlds dominant short-url-forwarder. No, the purpose of building this is the underlying technology which is now released as Open Source which is called Smurler. This is a Zope product that anybody can install and then use how they like it with their own domain name or other settings. At work we might soon need something like this and since many of our commercial sites use Zope it will be a breeze to install and benefit from the Smurl functionality for various other applications.

With the default set of sample characters used for the Smurl names there are 1024 different 2-character Smurls, 32,768 different 3-character Smurls and 1,048,576 different 4-character Smurls which will last my quite long on that domain name alone.

There isn't much fluff to it yet. The smurl.name site has only one special user function and that is that it remembers all previous Smurls you have created. The next thing I might add is some basic statistics for the overall use. If you have any other ideas, let me know.

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