Create Short URLs Using U.Nu
I was recently referred to another URL shortening website called u.nu. As far as shortening services go, u.nu seems to have the field beat as far as the shortest base URL. If you're really intent on creating the shortest possible URLs, look no further than u.nu's API.
The PHP
function get_unu_url($url)
{
$url = 'http://u.nu/unu-api-simple?url='.urlencode($url);
$ch = curl_init();
$timeout = 5;
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL,$url);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT,$timeout);
$url = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
return trim($url);
}
$short_url = get_unu_url('https://davidwalsh.name');
//returns http://u.nu/92e
That's it. I love that there's no XML or JSON involved with their API. What's returned is the URL and nothing more!
![Animated 3D Flipping Menu with CSS]()
CSS animations aren't just for basic fades or sliding elements anymore -- CSS animations are capable of much more. I've showed you how you can create an exploding logo (applied with JavaScript, but all animation is CSS), an animated Photo Stack, a sweet...
![5 Ways that CSS and JavaScript Interact That You May Not Know About]()
CSS and JavaScript: the lines seemingly get blurred by each browser release. They have always done a very different job but in the end they are both front-end technologies so they need do need to work closely. We have our .js files and our .css, but...
![CSS Selection Styling]()
The goal of CSS is to allow styling of content and structure within a web page. We all know that, right? As CSS revisions arrive, we're provided more opportunity to control. One of the little known styling option available within the browser is text selection styling.
![Detect DOM Node Insertions with JavaScript and CSS Animations]()
I work with an awesome cast of developers at Mozilla, and one of them in Daniel Buchner. Daniel's shared with me an awesome strategy for detecting when nodes have been injected into a parent node without using the deprecated DOM Events API.
Nice snippet David ! Thanks.
But it’s strange, a domain name can have just one letter, “u” in this case ? I always think the minimum was two.
Now if only they had analytics tracking…
“Domain names can be as short as one character. A premium of €500/yr applies to name registrations of one character in length, €250 for domain names of two-character length, and €30 per year for domain names of any other length. In June, 2008, .NU Domain began permitting registration of all-numeric domain names.”
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.nu
Unfortunately all one character domains are already bought :(
Wow! It seems the create API adds additional whitespace / carriage return though. Might want to additionally trim() the result.
I integrated it into PHPShortener
Thank you for reporting that Guillermo! Updated.
@Alex : thanks, it seems to be specific to dot nu :)
Hey David,
Nice work here, I had never heard of that particular url service, thanks for that. I was going to ask though, couldn’t you shorten it down to something like this?
Or was the reason because
file_get_contents
may not be available to everyone? I ask simply out of curiosity :)Thanks again!
@Drew Douglass: You can definitely use file_get_contents(). cURL is simply PHP best practice. Here’s a good resource:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/555523/filegetcontents-vs-curl-what-has-better-performance
Thanks for the link David, that is very helpful.
awesome post.
You may want to note in your post that this service no longer appears to exist.