Today, I felt like making a quick little Rails plugin and what better & easier than one that ties into TinyURL's tinyurl.com URL shortening services. The service works by you submitting them a URL, and they return to you a nice shortened version that redirects to the URL that you originally submitted. I've had to integrate their services into a web application before, but I didn't see a plugin made for this, so I thought I'd whip one up called ActsAsTinyURL because it was quick and easy.

script/plugin install http://acts-as-tiny-url.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/acts_as_tiny_url

How do you use it? It's extremely simple. Once installed, open up a controller you want to use it in and put 'include ActsAsTinyURL' right underneath the class declaration.

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  include ActsAsTinyURL
end

Once you've got this in place, you can start doing some quick magic.

tiny_url("http://brendanlim.com")  # => http://tinyurl.com/3274fk

Expect updates within the next few days when I get some added time in my schedule.

I'll be attending a presentation presented by Jeff Barr, Senior Evangelist, Amazon Web Services, at George Washington University about Amazon's three developer web services, S3 (Simple Storage Service), Simple Queue Service, and EC2 (Elastic Computing Cloud). He'll be speaking at a DC Ruby Users Group meeting.

I'm using Amazon's S3 for a project that I've been working on to store user uploads and the cost to benefit ratio of using S3 is quite amazing. To find out more information about Amazon S3, check out Amazon's S3 Page, or Amazon S3 Rails API, or if you want to see how to integrate it using something like attachment_fu, check out Mike Clark's Weblog.

Registration & event information can be found here.