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!
![Create a Sheen Logo Effect with CSS]()
I was inspired when I first saw Addy Osmani's original ShineTime blog post. The hover sheen effect is simple but awesome. When I started my blog redesign, I really wanted to use a sheen effect with my logo. Using two HTML elements and...
![CSS Animations Between Media Queries]()
CSS animations are right up there with sliced bread. CSS animations are efficient because they can be hardware accelerated, they require no JavaScript overhead, and they are composed of very little CSS code. Quite often we add CSS transforms to elements via CSS during...
![iPhone-Style Passwords Using MooTools PassShark]()
Every once in a while I come across a plugin that blows me out of the water and the most recent culprit is PassShark: a MooTools plugin that duplicates the iPhone's method of showing/hiding the last character in a password field. This gem of...
![Create a Brilliant Sprited, CSS-Powered Firefox Animation]()
Mozilla recently formally announced Firefox OS and its partners at Mobile World Congress and I couldn't be more excited. Firefox OS is going to change the lives of people in developing countries, hopefully making a name for itself in the US as well. The...
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?
function get_unu_url($url) { $url = file_get_contents('http://u.nu/unu-api-simple?url='.urlencode($url)); return $url; } echo get_unu_url('http://davidwalsh.name');Or was the reason because
file_get_contentsmay 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.