This is probably absolutely boring and irrelevant to 99% 100% of my readers, but I’m gonna write about it anyway. If only just for my own records.

While writing my links directory for Food4Geeks, I had an idea: I wanted the script to automatically/dynamically generate a short URL (using http://is.gd), every time someone views the detailed description of a link.

The code looked a little like this:

include 'inc/shorten.php';
$url = $siteurl.'resources/details/'.$resource_id;
$url = ShortUrl::create($url,'isgd');

So at the end, $url contained a working short URL for the record. Makes it easier to share on twitter and what not. But I descovered, that every time this is done, the site takes almost a second longer to load. I hate that kind of thing.

So I thought about a way to stop that. And I came up with a way. In the future, when I’ve written an admin area for the script, those URL will be generated when I insert new resources into the database. But for now (and as a failsafe), I’ve gone another way:

I’ve added a column to my resources table called ‘shorturl’. Every time someone clicks a resource (to see link details, description), the script checks if the resource in question has a short URL or not. If does, it fetches the short URL from my database and displays it to the user.
Result: loading time stays normal, no delays = Paul happy.

If it finds that no short URL is stored for that particular resource, it runs the above code and creates one. It then stores that new short URL.
Result: The first time that anyone ever clicks on the resource, the 1 second delay takes place. Because the short URL is created. But once that is done, there’s no more delays. Because then the short URL is stored in the database and all is well = Paul happy.

And the best part is: every time I insert a resource into the database, I check it myself anyway. So I’m the one that is the first to click it. So I get the 1 second delay. But nobody else will!

So yeah, this is a really cool little thing for me.

Some of you may know about my “Food4Geek” project. It’s a collection of links to tutorials, goodies and all kinds of resources for web developers, web designers and coders in general.

I launched the project using LinkEnginePro, which I bought for 39 Euros. The idea of it is really good. The concepts are very user-friendly and good. But the more I worked with it, the more I got tired of it. For example, it sometimes takes almost a minute for it to load a page. Be it in the admin area adding records, displaying a record or anything else. That annoys me hugely. And quite frankly, had I known to expect this, I would not have spent those 39 Euros.
Then there were more and more little and not so little bugs. Promises of updates and fixes… The support is OK, but nothing to write home about. Quite apart from the fact that they took their support forum offline and just brought it back. With all the posts and accounts gone.