Not trying to be funny here, but what you’re attempting is simple enough: a web based list of links. Why don’t you create a simple home page, one sub-page per chapter of your book, and on each sub-page, properly referenced, you provide the URLs?

That’s one way of doing it, but it puts the burden on the reader to enter the URL for that chapter, find the corresponding link, and then click it. That’s a little better than having some godawful long URL in the book, but it’s still not friendly enough.

As a reader, I want to be able to type in a short URL and get redirected to the page where I want to go. I suppose I could hack around with FrontPage or a similar site management program and get it to do the redirects for me, but I’m hoping that someone else has already had the same brainstorm and I can just use their code.

Getting the webserver to interpret a URL that doesn’t exist (edbott.com/23) instead of a URL with a GET string (edbott.com/link.asp?id=23) is easy: in IIS manager, you just map the custom error 404 to a new file you call 404.asp.

That file looks up URLs in a database (even an Access database will do) and redirects the users using Response.Redirect. I’d give you my code, but you seem to not be running IIS, and I don’t write PHP…

I’ve got some redirects on this site, but for a book project, the total number of URLs in the database would probably number in the hundreds, which is too many to manage manually.

You can find the example, as well as all the source code here: http://dacnomm.com/simpleurl/

As the page says, if you need help, drop me an email!

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/tweak/abbreviate/

- andy

1) I don’t know how to use mod_rewrite. I know it’s not difficult, but off the top of my head, I don’t have a clue.
2) Requires Apache, while the PHP / MySQL solution should work on IIS as well.
3) Many hosts (assuming you’re using shared hosting) won’t give you access to the Apache config file, and might lock down .htaccess as well, so you wouldn’t be able to use mod_rewrite.

PHP and MySQL may not be the most efficient solution in a couple ways, but it’s certainly got the broadest range of coverage, not to mention it’s incredibly easy…

I’ve left some comments on Chris’s post regarding the general problem and approach, but I may have a specific solution as well.

My firm has developed a .NET-based platform (dubbed “Liquid”), which essentially replaces the traditional webserver URL-resolution mechanism with a custom database lookup. It uses regular expressions to match and parse URLs, and to decide which handler class to load for each request; for example, any of;

http://books.edbott.com/mybook1/p123
http://www.mybook1.com/p123
http://books.edbott.com/mybook1/pg123
http://books.edbott.com/mybook1/p 123
http://books.edbott.com/mybook1/page 123

Can be regex-matched and parsed as book=mybook1, page=123, then passed off to a ‘BookPage’ handler for the HTML rendering.

Individually numbered URLs would be similar;

http://books.edbott.com/mybook1/123
http://www.mybook1.com/123
http://books.edbott.com/mybook1/url 123
http://books.edbott.com/mybook1/urls/123

And you can simplify entry by offering a book mainpage with a “type in the URL number here” entry area.

I currently use the system for very large affiliate programs where millions of discrete URLs are required, but the system has a lot of other applications.

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the “hand-typed-URL” problem and am working on ideas for how to develop a service for book authors, publishing houses, magazines, newspapers, radio stations, direct mail campaigns, etc.

If the self-hosted PHP approach isn’t a rigid requirement, and the rough concept sounds like a fit, maybe we should consider an experiment.

Ed Bott is looking for a system that can create “tiny” URLs and store them on your local system, as opposed to storing them on someone else’s server. I’m interested in this ideal also, but haven’t seen anything. It would…