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= vurl.me

A simple URL-shortening app that was live-coded during Jax Code Camp 2007 as part of my Distributed, Rapid Application Development with git and Ruby On Rails talk.

== API Access

Use VURL as your custom URL shortening service in clients like Tweetie. You can submit an html or a json request to the service.

http://vurl.me/shorten?url=http://mycrazylongurlthat/desperately/needs/shortening

will return a plain text response with the shortened url:

http://vurl.me/OMG

Or use json:

http://vurl.me/shorten.json?url=http://mycrazylongurlthat/desperately/needs/shortening

will return a json response with the shortened url:

{:shortUrl => 'http://vurl.me/OMG'}

Optionally, include an api token to associate the new vurl with your user account:

http://vurl.me/shorten?url=http://google.com/&api_token=a56fc453

== Tracker

You can view development efforts by visiting Vurl's Tracker project at {http://www.pivotaltracker.com/projects/12552}[http://www.pivotaltracker.com/projects/12552]

== Development requirements

The screenshot code requires the wkthmltoimage executable. You can find more information at the Google Code page (http://vurl.me/TLA). If you don't have wkhtmltoimage the site will work normally, but you won't have any screenshots generated.

Screenshots and metadata are fetched out of process - you'll need redis and resque running to process those. After installing redis, you can start it with the following command:

redis-server /usr/local/etc/redis.conf

... and run resque via the rake task:

rake environment resque:work

== Apostles of Veezus and His URL Shortener (or, Credits)

• Credit for the original design goes to Alex Daskalov (@andpersand)
• Tweetie endpoints graciously donated by Wes Gibbs (@wesgibbs / github: wgibbs)
• Stats page and bug fixes supplied by Corey Haines (@coreyhaines / github: coreyhaines)
• Initial implementation of twitter searching by Jim Remsik (@jremsikjr / github: bigtiger)
• Bugfixes and conversion to bundler by Paul Elliott (@p_elliott / github: paulelliott)
• Database indexes and performance tuning by Rafa Garcia (@leptom / github: rgo)