urlShorty Dec 2013

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Project Description

urlShorty is an Bitly-like application that lets users shorten long URLs and manage short and long URL associations over time. It allows users to define custom short names for their URLs, and also contains mechanisms for generating random URLs as well as suggested URLs based on the URL’s html title tag. urlShorty has a user/login mechanism to allow users to personalize the various urls.

Team Members

  • Tiffany Barkley
  • Cameron Reed
  • Faith Hutchinson
  • Christopher Fan

Technical Details

urlShorty uses the Flask web framework for url redirection. urlShorty stores url associations and usernames/passwords in a MySQL database. Passwords are stored encrypted using bcrypt algorithm.

Github: https://github.com/christopherfan/urlShorty

Recommendation Feature

urShorty has a feature to recommend to the user suggested words to a shorten the long urls. The feature works well with news articles that have recently occurred events

  1. Use curl to pre-fetch the HTTP header of an url and extract the <title> information of the url
  2. Filter common words and punctuation from the title
  3. Use the Twitter Search API to generate frequencies of co-occurring hashtags
  4. Create a histogram of popular terms

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