Shortening URLs in-house

Patrick — Thu, 27 May 2010 21:21:01 +0000

All websites now use URL extensions that redirect for easy to remember URLs.

A recent example is Google’s http://google.com/pacman – a simple / and one word is much easier to remember than say /google_pacman.html (which is still keeping it simple!)
(I’m sure if you looked into it, the files aren’t actually stored in a /pacman folder either )

There are URL shortening methods out there, such as http://bit.ly and http://tiny.cc, but I feel these don’t give you enough power for customisation. And what if you have your own domain that you want to use?!

I’ve made my own simple ‘Redirect Setup Script’ that enables you to create redirects with the click of a button.
You can view a demo here: http://patjack.co.uk/newurls (note this doesn’t actually set up any redirects on my site ) and see how easy it is.

My method uses PHP that appends the redirect to your root .htaccess file, and uses mod_rewrite. An alternative method would be to use a meta redirect, which I’ve included in the downloadable folder for those that might not have mod_rewrite on their servers. The downside to the meta redirect is that you need to actually create the folder and index.html file, the .htaccess method just uses the root .htaccess file.

To swap between using the .htaccess mod_rewrite method and the meta re-direct method, just open up ‘process.php’ and change the $use_htaccess from TRUE to FALSE.

The script also uses REGEX to make sure you don’t use some silly extension, or input an invalid URL.

To use, just download the folder from here

A quick example

I’ve set up a redirect for when I have a chocolate cake craving but don’t want to bake a whole cake. To see my secret, click through to http://patjack.co.uk/cake. Mmmmm…

Download: Script.zip

Here’s what gets appended to your root .htaccess and the index.html files respectively

.htaccess

RedirectMatch /".$_YOUR_EXTENSION."/.* ".$_URL_GOES_HERE." [R=301,L] RedirectMatch /".$_YOUR_EXTENSION." ".$_URL_GOES_HERE." [R=301,L]";
There’s a need for two redirects to catch both cases where you may browse to example.com/extension (with no slash) example.com/extension/ (with a slash) or anything else – example.com/extension/index.html

index.html

Redirect

Preloading images with css

Patrick — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 07:03:02 +0000

The order in which images load when viewing a website fis always a tricky thing to get right. Usually, if you have any sort of javascript gallery for viewing images, these images will load first (as javascript normally loads first). This is always a pain if the main layout images have not yet loaded – you’ll get the javascript gallery appearing with none of the layout images.

There are plenty of solutions out there to set the order of image loading, and most solutions use javascript. Now to me, this is like trying to fight fire with fire; solving the problem of certain javascript images loading first with yet more javascript. But what’s wrong with javascript, surely a little more won’t harm anyone.
Well, javascript means more work for the client’s computer and makes loading times (only a fraction) slower. Also, if you’re not that familiar with javascript, is can be quite daunting to keep adding this.object(); and that.var=10; to your code.

I’ve come up with a far simpler and easier method to solve the problem using only valid CSS and good old HTML.

My trick uses the display:none; style.

What you need to do is add the img tag:

straight after the opening tag. This will be the first thing your browser picks up, meaning it should be the first thing your browser loads (even though it’s not displayed!) Now when the image crops up again later on in the source, it will have already been loaded into the cache and can be displayed instantly.

A simple, valid, cross-browser compliant solution.

Web Design » html

Shortening URLs in-house

A quick example

.htaccess

index.html

Preloading images with css