Sl.vu

Sl.vu is another in a series of sites that provide functionality for generating shortened URLs from long ones. It's no different.

So, why'd we make it? For Gus, it was for the fun of it. For Toddo, it was for a potential business opportunity.

Why is it called Sl.vu?

1. It was an available domain.
2. Not sure what it means. It can mean whatever you want it to mean:
3. Sinatra Lovers Virally Uniting
4. Shallow liars vindicated us
5. Sticky links, venerable underwriting
6. Some like Veruca's ukulele
7. ...

How does it work?

Like any other link shortner. You come to the site, put a long URL in the provided field, click the submit button. You will be taken to a page with a preview of the new, shortened link. Copy the generated link and share with the world.

Sl.vu also supports a preview option. Just add a hyphen in front of the unique ID in the provided URL. For example, if the generated URL was http://sl.vu/a1b2c3, modify that URL like so to make it a preview URL: http://sl.vu/-a1b2c3. Easy, peezy.

Using App

Requirements

• Rack
• Sinatra
• Chicago
• HAML
• ActiveRecord

Setting up an app

Installation

Clone the repository locally.

$ git clone git://github.com/jaknowlden/slvu.git

You'll want to update the Vlad the Deployer deployment recipe to distribute it to other servers. See config/deploy/base.rb. Deploy using rake tasks, like: rake vlad:deploy.

Configuration

There really isn't a lot of configuration beyond the database setup. To change that, see config/database.rb. Sl.vu uses ActiveRecord, which means you just need to update the ConnectionOptions accordingly.

Running

Somewhat of a trick question. To run tests, simply do:

rake test

To run in development mode, make sure you have the Thin gem installed and:

APP_ENV=development thin start -p 4567 -R config.ru

In production, we suggest using Phusion's Passenger, but you can do whatever you like. If you do use Phusion, the following VirtualHost directive is known to work. Update accordingly:

TBD

Todo

• Readme/about for site users to understand how to use the system
• Expiremental links section (UTF8). Perhaps, "I feel lucky" thing
• Translation
• Choose your own link

Acknowledgements

Todd Kelsey for never forgetting that he asked me for something and I said it was easy.

Legal

Copyright © 2009 Justin Knowlden, Todd Kelsey, Thumble Monks; released under the MIT license