SHURL.MOBI: Shortcuts for your Mobile Phone

While in Iowa this weekend I had lots of time to think and kick around ideas during downtime. Part of that time was spent checking the availability of domain names.

I know most experts agree that your product/idea should be completely fleshed out and ready to implement long before a domain name comes into the picture. But for some reason my brain doesn't work that way. Having a name to build around is what makes the journey more exciting and personal.

Not the best analogy here but it's almost like raising a child. Before you've ever taught them one lesson, shown them any compassion, or begun to bond with them you've given them a name. You don't wait until their 18 to look them over and say "Well Concept Child #717341, you look and act like a Bob would, and it's catchy, so... your name is now Bob."

Besides, domains are cheap. If you picked the wrong name, so what? Buy a new domain when you're all done. There's just something about having your .COM flag waving out there waiting to be populated with your product, your idea, your mental sweat that gets the blood pumping!

This weekend one of the ideas flowing around my head was: "Wouldn't it be great to have a tool that I could quickly convert any website into a mobile browser friendly site, and get a shortened URL to punch into my phone to view it?"

First domain name idea that came to my head was chop.mobi. And for a "reasonable" price of $4,000 it could have been mine. Pass. Cut.mobi? Gone. Clip.mobi? Forget it.

So after running down the list, finally SHURL.MOBI emerged as the winner. (Mostly because it was available.)

Now that I had the domain, what to do with it? Enter a great free PHP script called YOURLS. By configuring and installing the script on your server it lets anyone manage their own URL shortening site. The setup was incredibly easy: create a MySQL database for YOURLS on your server, edit the configuration file to match the setting you want, create a .htaccess file that gives YOURLS the permissions it needs, run the installation.php file and you're done.

But that was only a third of the battle. How do I convert the pages into a mobile friend format? That's where Google's Mobilizer comes in. Google Mobilizer takes any URL and converts it into a mobile browser friendly format. It's not the prettiest, and in the case of some blogs you have to scroll past any content they have in the left column to get to the article you were trying to read (LifeHacker.com, for example) but for the most part it's a decent tool that makes sending requests to it easy as pie. You simply have to insert the site you want converted right in the URL.

For example:

http://www.google.com/gwt/x?u=http://eatwithaspork.com&btnGo=Go&source=wax&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

Simply replace http://eatwithaspork.com with the URL you want converted and you're done.

So now I have the domain, I have the shortening script installed, I have the mobile converting tool selected... now it's time to bring it all together.

The magic happens in the sample PHP code that comes with YOURLS. When creating the INDEX.PHP file from that sample code, I simply slipped in two new variables before the $url definition.

$part1 = "http://www.google.com/gwt/x?u=";

$part2 = "&btnGo=Go&source=wax&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8";

Then I changed the $url line to include the two new variables:

$url = $part1.$_REQUEST['url'].$part2;

With the changes made, each time a URL gets shortened it automatically gets fed to the Google Mobilizer as the complete and correct URL.

Thus http://shurl.mobi/1 appears as http://eatwithaspork.com converted for the mobile screen.

Could shurl.mobi be better? Absolutely. Statistics tracking, the ability to turn images off, and cutting out the Google middle man by doing the conversion directly are some improvements I see right off the bat.

Interested in making something happen? Let's work something out. This might be a project worth funding myself if the price is right.

Photo by Pawel Kabanski