Shufflegazine’s Own TinyURL

Something we’ve struggled a bit with is how to deal with URLs in the magazine. Sometimes it’s easy, like www.apple.com, but sometimes it’s not so easy, like http://etisalat.ae/index.jsp?lang=en&type=service&contentid=5a9c2f3264190110VgnVCM1000000c24a8c0RCRD&currentid=c830a5714ec5b010VgnVCM1000000c24a8c0____.

And with the advent of the iTunes App Store it’s especially problematic since a URL to an app can be really long. So what we’ve done is work with TinyURL. A TinyURL can look like this for example, http://tinyurl.com/chsrb2. You can also customize your Tiny URL, for example http://tinyurl.com/xeon5500.

But we wanted a system where we can store all our short URLs for the future and also something that’s easier for us and our readers to remember.

So we hacked together our own simple system with PHP and MySQL, we call it ShuffleTo.

Try for example http://shuffle.to/xeon5500. When we write that in the magazine it’ll be “shuffle.to/xeon5500″. Pretty good, we think.

The system still needs a lot of development but it’s functional so we intend to use it from the May issue. Basically we enter the full and short versions in a web interface, it’s saved in a database and whenever someone goes to a short URL it’s retrieved from the database and the user is redirected. We don’t randomly create a code, like x67yu or something, that is hard to read and remember, all our ShuffleTo URLs are words we type in. A bit more work for us but easier for our readers.

This is just the beginning we hope. It’s easy to see that in the future we could automatically put all URLs for one issue somewhere on the web site so you can just go there and click on what you want to read more about. This could of course also be used for advertising, where there might be a ShuffleTo address for products and services advertised.

We hope you like this and please give us any feedback you might have. We leave you with two ShuffleTo links to try: shuffle.to/etisalatblackberry and shuffle.to/ilife09.