Robby on Rails: Category RubyURL

RubyURL meets Zombies!

Robby Russell — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 11:43:00 -0500

Last Friday, Greg Borenstein sent me a link to ZombieURL after it got launched. The folks at Bottlecap Labs took RubyURL and threw in Zombies… the rest you’ll have to see for yourself.

don’t click this link

There… I warned you.

You can check out the source code for ZombieURL on GitHub

http://github.com/bottlecaplabs/zombieurl/tree

You can also grab the underlying source code for RubyURL on GitHub.

http://github.com/robbyrussell/rubyurl/tree/master

I’d love to see what other fun things people come up with to do with RubyURL.

Launch your own RubyURL

Robby Russell — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 18:31:00 -0600

A few weeks ago, I moved RubyURL from subversion to git. During that process, I decided to use my invite to GitHub and have decided to go ahead and open up the source code.

It’s currently a whopping 92 LOC with a 1:2.5 code to spec ratio. (I had a goal to keep is below 100 LOC)

RubyURL on GitHub: http://github.com/robbyrussell/rubyurl
Public Clone URL: git://github.com/robbyrussell/rubyurl.git

Feel free to grab it and help contribute. This has served almost 14 million redirects since August 2007 and is running on a Rails Boxcar.

To grab it with git.. run: git clone git://github.com/robbyrussell/rubyurl.git.

Feel free to submit tickets to the Rubyurl ticket system.

http://planetargon.lighthouseapp.com/projects/4059-rubyurl

Enjoy!

UPDATE Ryan McGeary was kind enough to be the first person to help track down a bug and submit patches. :-)

RubyURL through QuickSilver

Robby Russell — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 20:42:00 -0600

When Chris Griffin saw this post, he wanted to do the same with RubyURL. Since the ShortURL gem was broken, I didn’t get a chance to dive into it. However, with the shorturl command now working again with RubyURL, we get QuickSilver and RubyURL working together really quickly.

First, you’ll need a recent version of the ShortURL gem installed.

sudo gem install shorturl

Then you will want to add the following to ~/Library/Scripts/rubyurl.scpt. You will need to create this file.


  #
  # Change accordingly if shorturl is not under /usr/bin/shorturl
  #
  set shorturl_cmd to "/opt/local/bin/shorturl" 

  tell application "Safari" 
      set original_url to URL of front document
  end tell

  set cmd to shorturl_cmd & " " & original_url

  set ruby_url to do shell script cmd
  set the clipboard to ruby_url as text
  beep

Then you can add this script to run through QuickSilver. For details, jump to the setup process on this post.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

This will make it much easier to paste RubyURLs into my Twitter client, IRC, etc.

I’ll try to post a more thorough tutorial soon, but wanted to share in the meantime.

ShortURL 0.8.4 released and gets a new mainainer... me!

Robby Russell — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 18:49:00 -0600

Earlier today, Vincent Foley was kind enough to hand over maitenance of the the ShortURL project on RubyForge to me. He first released it back in 2005, which I blogged about as RubyURL was the first shortening service that it supported (and is the default). Unfortunately, the release of RubyURL 2.0 broke backwards compatibility and Vincent wasn’t maintaining it anymore. So, earlier, I decided to patch this and got a new version released that now works with the current RubyURL site.

While working on the code, I decided to extend the compatible services to include moourl and urlTea.

These updates are available in ShortURL version 0.8.4.

Install the ShortURL gem

Installation is a snap… (like 99.7% of rubygems…)


  ~ > sudo gem install shorturl                                                                                                                                                                                                           Password:

  Successfully installed shorturl-0.8.4
  1 gem installed
  Installing ri documentation for shorturl-0.8.4...
  Installing RDoc documentation for shorturl-0.8.4.

Using ShortURL

The ShortURL gem provides the ShortURL library, which you can use from any Ruby application.

Using the ShortURL library


  ~ > irb                                                                                                                                                                                                                           
  irb(main):001:0> require 'rubygems'
  => true
  irb(main):002:0> require 'shorturl'
  => true
  irb(main):003:0> ShortURL.shorten( 'http://www.istwitterdown.com' )
  => "http://rubyurl.com/P9w"

As you can see…it’s really straight forward.

Let’s try it with a few other services.


irb(main):004:0> ShortURL.shorten( 'http://www.istwitterdown.com', :moourl )
=> "http://moourl.com/fvoky" 
irb(main):005:0> ShortURL.shorten( 'http://www.istwitterdown.com', :tinyurl )
=> "http://tinyurl.com/2t3qmh"

Using the shorturl command-line tool

Many people don’t know that ShortURL provides a command-line tool, which you can use after installing the gem.


  ~ > shorturl http://istwitterdown.com                                                                                                                                                                                               
  http://rubyurl.com/Lwk

If you’d like to see more services provided than the ones listed here, please submit feature requests and/or patches on the rubyforge project.

http://rubyforge.org/projects/shorturl/

ShortURL Documentation

To see the latest documentation for the project, please visit:

http://rubyforge.org/projects/shorturl/

My favorite part about this? My rbot plugin for RubyURL works again!

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Happy URL-shortening!

Using MacPorts Ruby and Rails after Upgrading to OS X Leopard

Robby Russell — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 05:43:00 -0500

If you previously followed my article, Installing Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL on OS X, second edition and are now upgrading to OS X Leopard, you’ll want to make a few adjustments to your setup.

First of all, it’s great that Apple has decided to provide Ruby on Rails out of the box.


~ > gem list rails                                                                                                                                                                   
  *** LOCAL GEMS ***

  rails (1.2.3)
      Web-application framework with template engine, control-flow layer,
      and ORM.

How many gems does it come with?


~ > gem list|grep '^[a-z]'|wc -l                                                                                                                                                     
      29

It’s really great that Apple shipped Leopard pre-installed with 29 gems, especially if you don’t have your entire Rails stack setup already. In my case and for those that have followed my installation process, you don’t need to switch over to this new development stack (yet). I have a lot of time invested in my fully-functionaly MacPorts installation process (PostgreSQL, MySQL, RMagick, Subversion, Git, etc. Since this all working fine on my machine, I’m not ready to make the switch to Apple’s installation.

Don’t Fix it… if it’s not broken!

So, the the first thing that I did was modify my PATH environment variable, which has /usr/bin as the first path that it’ll look at when you try to run commands like ruby, mongrel_rails, gem, etc. You’ll want to modify this and prepend /opt/local/bin: to the front of PATH in your shell configuration. If you’re using bash, this would be… ~/.bashrc. If you’re using zshell like me, ~/.zshrc.

Now, when you start a new Terminal and run gem list, you’ll see all of the gems that you already have installed.


~ > gem list rails                                                                                                                                   < new-host

*** LOCAL GEMS ***

rails (1.2.5, 1.2.4, 1.2.3, 1.1.6)
    Web-application framework with template engine, control-flow layer,
    and ORM.

Back to my happy gems…


~ > gem list|grep '^[a-z]'|wc -l                                                                                                                                                              < new-host
      72

Great! Now I can get back to work and spend time playing with the new features in Finder, Mail.app, and iChat instead of installing all of the software dependencies that our development projects have. :-)

RubyURL bookmarklet 2.0

Robby Russell — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 10:51:00 -0500

If you’re using the bookmarklet for RubyURL, you will want to update it with the latest version as there was apparently a bug in the JavaScript and some URLs would fail to redirect properly. Thanks to the help of Jerome, this is now fixed.

So, head over to RubyURL and update your bookmarket. Not sure what I’m talking about? Watch the video.

RubyURL bookmarklet screencast

Robby Russell — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 00:36:00 -0500

I wanted to give Jing a try… so here goes my first screencast with it.

Enjoy!

RubyURL: new design and code base

Robby Russell — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 08:58:00 -0500

Yesterday evening, I deployed the new version of RubyURL. This was a collaborative effort between Chris Griffin and I, which we’re happy to finally push live.

There are a few things that we’re going to push out in near future, such as an API and a new RubyGem.

Chris volunteered to work on the new design and I did most of the programming in Ruby on Rails. When we worked on this, we really wanted to keep the process as simple as possible, despite some of the problems that the site has been having.

In the end, we have a Rails application that is only 85 lines of code and has a 1:2.3 code-to-spec ratio. I wanted to keep it under 100 lines of code. This means that there is some breathing room for further development.

We also tried out a beta account that I was given for RoundHaus for Subversion hosting. We had a really good experience using their service and were impressed by the plethora of useful features that came with the repository, such as continuous integration, rcov/code coverage stats, and twitter integration!.

If you find a bug, be sure to submit a ticket on the RubyURL bug tracker.

On a side note, we deployed this on a brand new Rails Boxcar, our new hosting solution that will be launched in the very near future. ;-)

RubyURL 2.0 on the horizon

Robby Russell — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 22:23:00 -0500

RubyURL was a project that I built about 2 1/2 years ago as a late night attempt to see what I could build and deploy with Ruby on Rails in a night. It’s nearing 50,000 unique website links, has a Ruby gem that you can use with it, and rbot plugins.

I’ve rewritten it about three times in the past six months, to try out some new approaches, but haven’t deployed with a new version as I’ve been waiting for someone to help me with a new design. Chris has offered to help out and once we integrate his new design with it, we’ll be launching it.

Everything is not great in RubyURL land though. It appears that it’s become an easy target for comment spammers to abuse the site to generate rubyurls and paste those links in their spam comments. Several pissed off bloggers, forum administrators, and system administrators have emailed me to complain that I’m spamming their site. Sadly, even with a basic disclaimer on the site, they still like to blame me for their spam. It’s gotten common enough, that I’ve written a template email that I respond with that explains how the site works and that I’m not accountable for people posting links to my URL redirect tool.

You can see that it’s popping up around the net via a google search.

So, I’ve been trying to think of ways to make it easier for people to flag URLs as being abusive of the site. I’ve not come up with any elegant solution that doesn’t force the good users of the site to have more steps in their process to create a basic RubyURL.

The ideal (and current) workflow:

User navigates to http://rubyurl.com
User pastes in long url into text box/area
User submits form
User is provided with new (shortened) rubyurl
User copies the rubyurl and does what they want with it (generally… pastes into IM, IRC, Email, etc.)

Some people have suggested using a user system to do this, but I really don’t like that as a solution.

Another idea, which I built… and later removed from my new version, involved having the original url load in a frame, and then provide a way for users to flag it as ‘spam’, ‘nsfw’, or ‘dead’. Then, we could provide the user with a warning that the following URL was flagged before, are you sure you want to continue? I didn’t like this as a solution in this way as it felt very obtrusive to have a rubyurl frame at the top of the browser window.

One person suggested a captcha to try and verify that the user is human, but there are problems with this.

I really dislike captchas. ;-)
This doesn’t prevent spammers from using the ShortURL gem, which does everything via an API.

In regards to the API, this could be enhanced by requiring that everyone register an email address to get an API key, but only solves the API abusers.

I’m starting to brainstorm some solutions that specifically help the requests made through the web. I haven’t checked the logs enough yet to verify it, but I have a strong suspicion that much of the abuse is happening through a web-based bot, not through ShortURL… because Ruby developers are nicer than that. (I hope…)

So, I am curious… dear readers of my blog. How might you solve this problem without disrupting the user experience? Or, should I just stick with what I’ve got going and find a better way to respond to pissed off bloggers who think I’m spamming them?

Discuss…

Goodbye Instiki, Hello JunebugWiki

Robby Russell — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 10:46:00 -0600

If you’ve spent much time on the Ruby on Rails wiki, you know that the spam situation smells like rotten fruit.

We’ve been using Instiki, the same software as the Rails wiki for the PLANET ARGON Documentation Project and the spam situation was becoming an annoyance. So, we’ve switched to JunebugWiki as step one, to see how it holds up. The default styling was a nice improvement because we haven’t had much chance to update the instiki one. It might not solve all of our spam problems, but in the short term, it appears to be a more elegant solution. It’s also the first application built with camping that I have personally deployed.

So… I present to you… the new PLANET ARGON Documentation Project.

In other news, it appears that RubyURL has caught the eye of spammers, which sucks. I’m still thinking over a few possible ways to try and prevent that. :-/

RubyURL hits 10k

Robby Russell — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 22:47:00 -0500

Just happened to notice that RubyURL passed the 10k mark recnetly. :-)

“10044 happy rubyurls to date”

I think it’s time for a rewrite and an API. :-)

RubyURL reaches 2000 URLs

Robby Russell — Sun, 25 Sep 2005 15:35:00 -0500

Today, RubyURL reached two-thousand happy rubyurls!

That’s right! 2,000!

The traffic has picked up a bit since a few bots started to use it in IRC channels and with the easy browser toolbar feature is. It’s cool to see people using it on the ruby-related mailing lists, and there seems to be quite a few people in Japan who use it to link to/from Japanese fetish sites (I won’t ask what a green-tea-zipper-party is…). Whatever floats your boat. ;-)

In any event, HAPPY 2000!

Let’s hit 10,000 before it becomes one year old! :-)

http://rubyurl.com

RubyURL meets rbot

Robby Russell — Tue, 13 Sep 2005 21:48:00 -0500

I was asked to submit the small plugin that I created for rbot so that we can do fun stuff like this in #pdx.rb (irc.freenode.net).


21:42 < robbyonrails> ?help rubyurl
21:42 < pdxrbot> rubyurl <your long url>
21:43 < robbyonrails> ?rubyurl http://www.google.com/
21:43 < pdxrbot> Your RubyURL: http://rubyurl.com/hbGjx

It’s nothing complex and uses the plugin example as a foundation. I just popped in my ShortURL requires and modified what it replies with.

We’re almost at 2,000 unique URLs in RubyURL. :-)

You can pick up the plugin here in the trac for rbot. I don’t know if it will be accepted in the default plugins or not, but you can download the file there and start using it today!

Have fun!

RubyURL raises the bar and becomes a TEXT field

Robby Russell — Wed, 17 Aug 2005 22:50:00 -0500

It came to my attention that this RubyURL site that I built many many months ago… would BREAK on URLs that were too long. Thanks to Xinu for figuring that one out and bringing it to my attention. As a result, we gave him a free Typo blog account!

The Problem?

You see, the field was VARCHAR(255).

I really didn’t even see that coming… DOH!

The Solution

I changed it to a TEXT field.

So, you can all sleep well tonight… knowing that the problem is fixed.

This is also a perfect example of why I like PostgrSQL over MySQL. If the site were running MySQL, it wouldn’t have shown Xinu an error as MySQL would have silently truncated anything over the limit and then people would send out bogus RubyURLs.


truncated url = bad rubyurl mojo

This also reminded me that it is time that I spend a few hours working on new features to the site. :-)

RubyURL ( http://rubyurl.com/ )... over 1500+ rubyurls served…

Thanks again Xinu! .. and welcome to the Rails community!

UPDATE I did a search for ‘rubyurl’ and found a review of it compared to some other short url services.

“rubyurl It may be a tech demo, but rubyurl has a clean interface and a small pae. It may not be the most feature-packed service, but it works, and it works well. If only it were faster – about a second and a half for a URL, by my count, makes it too slow for script or website use.”

Link: Comparing the URL Shortening Services by Brian Cairns

Perhaps it is time to move it to Lighttpd? While I was at it, I shrunk the length of rubyurls by two characters. That puts it at the second shortest on that list. It was a 5 char string, but is now a 3 char string. I think that should be sufficient for a while. :-)

RubyURL This!

Robby Russell — Fri, 22 Jul 2005 18:33:00 -0500

I fixed a bug in the RubyURL This!

A few people reported problems, and I added a catch to prevent those who accidently click on it while on the rubyurl.com page. ;-)

http://rubyurl.com/

(link/instructions on page)

RubyURL shortcut for your toolbar

Robby Russell — Tue, 19 Jul 2005 09:30:00 -0500

I realized that I never posted my bookmark for RubyURL.


javascript:void(location.href='http://rubyurl.com/rubyurl/remote?website_url='+location.href)

Just drag/copy this link to your toolbar.

RubyURL this!

Maybe if I get some time soon, I will work on a firefox extention, but for the time being, this is cross-browser friendly. :-)

The last time that I checked, there were about 1300 unique rubyurls generated. Maybe this will help drive up that count. :-)

RubyURL hits 1000 URLs!

Robby Russell — Fri, 10 Jun 2005 13:41:30 -0500

It wasn’t that long ago that I spent an evening trying to build a quick and simple Rails app. I built RubyURL that night.


rubyurl=# SELECT count(id) FROM rubyurls ;
 count
-------
  1000
(1 row)

Sweet!

Don’t forget to check out ShortURL for rubyurl usage. :-)

Oddly enough, this is #1000:

http://rubyurl.com/OddwR

RubyURL-friendly library

Robby Russell — Wed, 01 Jun 2005 18:21:00 -0500

Vincent Foley-Bourgon has just released ShortURL.

From his post:

You can install it with RubyGems:

$ gem install -r shorturl

or you can go to http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=732 and download
the tar.bz2 archive.

Usage is very simple, here's a sample irb session:

>> require "rubygems" 
=> true 
>> require "shorturl" 
=> false 
>> ShortURL.shorten("http://groups-beta.google.com/group/comp.lang.ruby") 
=> "http://rubyurl.com/eiRDm" 
>> ShortURL.shorten("http://groups-beta.google.com/group/comp.lang.ruby", :tinyurl) 
=> "http://tinyurl.com/bfuu2"

On that note, RubyURL is almost at 1,000 unique URLs!

RubyURL still growing

Robby Russell — Mon, 04 Apr 2005 15:00:30 -0500

I haven’t had time to work on RubyURL.com for a few weeks, but it’s nice to see that people are still utilizing it. There are over 500 unique RubyURLs currently in the system as of today. I haven’t had any feedback on it in a while and/or complaints… so that is a good sign (I think). I want to add some AJAX to the process… just because I can. :-)

On that note, if you have any feature requests, feedback, etc… please submit them as a comment in this post and I will address them on my next round of updates to the site.

RubyURL still growing

Robby Russell — Mon, 04 Apr 2005 15:00:30 -0500

On that note, if you have any feature requests, feedback, etc… please submit them as a comment in this post and I will address them on my next round of updates to the site.

Ruby Weekly News

Robby Russell — Sun, 20 Mar 2005 17:36:43 -0600

RubyURL was mentioned int his weeks Ruby Weekly News. I just checked the db, there are just over 400 urls now in the system.

I have discussed a few different features with a few people in the comments on this blog as a few people on IRC (#rubyonrails). I am going to try to work on some of these ideas this week while I am on vacation.

Ruby Weekly News

Robby Russell — Sun, 20 Mar 2005 17:36:43 -0600

RubyURL was mentioned int his weeks Ruby Weekly News. I just checked the db, there are just over 400 urls now in the system.

FastCGI installed

Robby Russell — Wed, 16 Mar 2005 16:44:12 -0600

I finally got FastCGI to install. (apparently you need to install FastCGI prior to installing mod_fastcgi). heh.

So, RubyURL and RobbyonRails should both be much faster. grins

FastCGI installed

Robby Russell — Wed, 16 Mar 2005 16:44:12 -0600

I finally got FastCGI to install. (apparently you need to install FastCGI prior to installing mod_fastcgi). heh.

So, RubyURL and RobbyonRails should both be much faster. grins

RubyURL.com, worth the wait?

Robby Russell — Wed, 16 Mar 2005 07:58:19 -0600

Some people are discussing RubyURL on the Ruby-Talk mailing list on ways to know where you will go before clicking on the link..or before getting to the destination url.

Hal Futon suggested this method: http://rubyurl.com/www.yahoo.com:ajZkXDls

..but I think that would be too long of a URL for things with longer urls than www.yahoo.com.

My suggestion/compromise would be the following: User clicks on rubyurl link, is taken to page that shows the page they will be redirected to (or even just the domain name) and they wait for a few seconds before it redirects. During this time they could opt-out of allowing the redirect and click a ‘Back’ button.

What do you think? I am open to suggestions on to best address this concern..or is it even a concern? (tinyurl doesn’t think it is..or at least they don’t do this..so, should RubyURL?)

night…

Minor RubyURL update

Robby Russell — Tue, 15 Mar 2005 16:41:06 -0600

I added a check to rubyurl so that it will reuse an existing short_url rather than creating unique urls for every entry. (there are 21 entries for slashdot.. heh)

Hoping to add the filter checks later so that you don’t get the error page when you try to add something like ‘rubyurl.com’ into the system.

Cheers