I recently created a complete site that is a link shortening tool which allows you to run your own public link shortener that keeps statistics on user clicks, and also displays a feed of what is ‘hot’ right now, based on the communities use / click throughs. This article is a quick rundown on how to set it up, and where to view a running demo.

This application is built using the CodeIgniter base and the MVC approach, and comes with the CodeIgniter userguide, which is located in the user_guide directory. For more information on CodeIgniter, please visit www.codeigniter.com

A full demo of the tool is at http://mls.subooa.com (the admin area is still private as this is a running site, you’ll have access to your own admin area when you setup your site)

First of all, you’ll need to download the package which you can get from Themeforest at the following location:

http://themeforest.net/item/my-link-shortener/51104

So lets get started…

Create a new database called mls (you can change this if you like, however you’ll need to edit the database.php file to suit)
Run the database.sql file on that database using your preferred method (import using phpmyadmin for example).

The following files need to be modified to match your environment:

application/config/database.php
application/config/config.php
application/config/site_config.php

You will also need to change the about and terms page content to reflect your own site.
The files are located in the application/views folder as about.php and terms.php respectively.

Finally, you’ll need to edit template.htaccess, if you want to run this in a folder you’ll need to place the folder name before index.php (e.g., /folder/index.php ), otherwise the entry should read just /index.php. Rename template.htaccess to .htaccess

And that’s all there is to it! You now have your very own link shortening tool setup and running. If you have any questions / issues with the app, please post them on the discussion page on the item on Themeforst, not here as other people will also be able to benefit from the responses.

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