The problem Shorten It solves

ShortenIt

ShortenIt helps users to shorten their links, thus reducing some precious characters in their social media posts. Our project also provides the creators analytics for the shortened links which can help them analyse their content and understand the viewers better.

Key Features:

• Create shortened URLs in a single click
• Auto-generated URLs using the CRC32 algorithm
• Customizable shortened URLs until it is unique
• Analytics to track shortened links and audience engagement

With ShortenIt, you can make the most out of your social media posts by saving valuable time and tracking your audience's behavior.

Tech Stack

• Perl CGI
• Java Server Pages
• HTML
• CSS
• Bootstrap
• Javascript
• MYSQL

JSP

Java Server Pages have been us to perform all the HTTP redirecting for the URL shortening
JSP has been used to collect and store analytical data of the users

Perl CGI

Perl CGI has been used for user authentication and implementing BlowFish and CRC32 encoding
It has also been used to perform creation and deletion of shortened URLs from the MYSQL database
Actual SHortening tasks have been performed by Perl CGI

Chart.js

Chart.js has been used to display usage analytics of the various shortened links

Challenges I ran into

• Main challenge encountered was encoding entire URL strings into 8 charachter strings
• In order to solve this problem we used CRC32 encoding
• Another challenge was combining Perl CGI and JSP into a single project
• The final major challenge was making sure the entire project can run on the TOmcat server even though it consisted off different programming languages