Create your private bit.ly and twitpic
As you know that some web 2.0 services, such as twitter web clients, URL shorteners, and picture hosting services cannot be accessed steadily in Mainland China. Perhaps you know how to break through the “wall”, but as information promulgators, we would better make our resources accessible for masses without special network skills or the lazy ones. A few months ago, I wrote Imagoxy, a picasa proxy for my blog readers. And these days a private URL shortener and a private picture hosting service are built for my twitter followers.
I chose a free PHP hosting service with advertisements to host these web applications. For one thing, I do not want my paid host be punished for being related to them accidentally, while free spaces are easily replaceable. For another, advertisements are only appended to htmls, and yet URL forwarding and picture files are not affected.
There are lots of free URL shortener scripts based on PHP and MySQL. I prefer TightURL, which is relatively simpler than the others, since web pages with rich features such as AJAX may go wrong for appended advertisements. Apache's RewriteEngine should be enabled to make the short URL more graceful. And you can also modify “tighturl.*.tmpl” to make it more friendly to users and external caller scripts. Like most of public URL shorteners, TightURL can be dragged into browser's bookmarks for convenience.
I had not found a free and simple enough PHP application to host pictures for twitter. So I wrote a tiny script for myself. It saves uploaded picture and send a tweet via twitter API (with shortened URL). I employed PHP Twitter to call twitter API for its simplicity. The script is accessible from my cellphone, so I can upload the taken photos instantly. I will release the script after more security measure taken.
More services can be deployed on free / advertisement web hosting sites. However, these sites are also usually banned by the “wall”. You should backup your data periodically and be ready to migrate at all times. The only unaltered entrance for your twitter followers is your domain name – unless you have too much influence infuriating somebody.
At last, my private services' domain name is “Jian.me”. It originates from my given name. It's interesting that “Jian” can be thought as “简” or “减” for URL shortener using.
1 Trackback(s)