More info about Smurl
The word "Smurl" comes from "Small" + "URL".
The idea of the Smurl came from the need for a base system that does
exactly what Smurl does. We needed a pluggable web application that we
can use to do what this site does but for various projects and different domains.
This website you're looking at right now is just an implementation with a
Smurl Folder Zope object base. It allows
you this functionality but does nothing in terms of presentation. All it really
gives you for an interface is the createSmurl function which accepts
a parameter url and returns the corresponding redirect URL.
Open Source
The Smurl Folder base object is available as a downloadable Zope product here:
The license is ZPL
Smurl Web Services
This Smurl website has a simple but useful web API that any body can use. Suppose Python is your favorite weapon:
>>> import xmlrpclib
>>> api = xmlrpclib.Server('http://smurl.name/')
>>> print api.createSmurl('http://www.somelengthydomain.name/path/test')
'http://smurl.name/6r'About the redirecting
The redirecting is a straight forward simple server side redirect. It does not use any client side scripting.
Google will understand and spider these redirects. When it does so, it does not index the found content at the destination with the Smurl URL. That basically means that the URL you see when searching for a site that Google has found by spidering a Smurl will be the destination URL. In other words, you will never see any Smurl URLs on the Google result page. Believe it if you like; Google indexing is still very much like alchemy.
About the author
Peter Bengtsson is a senior web
programmer at Fry-IT based in London, England.
Read the announcement about Smurl.name on www.peterbe.com