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!
![I’m an Impostor]()
This is the hardest thing I've ever had to write, much less admit to myself. I've written resignation letters from jobs I've loved, I've ended relationships, I've failed at a host of tasks, and let myself down in my life. All of those feelings were very...
![Create a CSS Flipping Animation]()
CSS animations are a lot of fun; the beauty of them is that through many simple properties, you can create anything from an elegant fade in to a WTF-Pixar-would-be-proud effect. One CSS effect somewhere in between is the CSS flip effect, whereby there's...
![Submit Button Enabling]()
"Enabling" you ask? Yes. We all know how to disable the submit upon form submission and the reasons for doing so, but what about re-enabling the submit button after an allotted amount of time. After all, what if the user presses the "stop"...
![Dynamically Load Stylesheets Using MooTools 1.2]()
Theming has become a big part of the Web 2.0 revolution. Luckily, so too has a higher regard for semantics and CSS standards. If you build your pages using good XHTML code, changing a CSS file can make your website look completely different.
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.