swaha.me

This project makes use of PHP, MySQL, and a little bit of JQuery. I wanted to expand my web programming knowledge a bit beyond working with static web pages. I had the domain ‘swaha.me’ that I got for free with github student packages some time ago and it turns out to be a pretty nice name for a URL shortener. From Wikipedia, swaha (svāhā, soha, etc.) translates literally to “well said.”

The shortener works kind of like a hash table, where unique input URLs are assigned a hash as part of their unique shortened URL. Links are the domain/extension followed by these 8 alphanumeric characters. With 64-bit version of PHP there are 2^63-1 = ~9 quintillion possible ids and with a 62 character alphabet (A-Z, a-z, 0-9) there are 62^8 = ~200 trillion possible unique links. Keep in mind there are going to be many, many collisions, but this should be pretty good for my purposes (rickrolling my friends).

Find the code here.

edit: I turned this off in 2016. RIP swaha.me.