I was fiddling around with an idea in my head to write a small website that helped me translate stock charts into nice looking URL’s. Most of the time, when you look at a stock chart and want to share that with someone, the URL is GIGANTIC. It contains all sorts of cool variables, vectors, really everything that the site needs to paint the proper chart. I wanted a way to copy and paste a URL that was MUCH shorter, so that I can use them in systems that limit my character usage. Also, it just gives me a much cleaner URL that can be embedded anywhere you might be linking to charts without having a really crappy looking URL.
Well, with that, I spent last night watching hockey and writing an application, called Twrts (pronounced Tw-arts), with Google’s App Engine. You can check it out here:
It was an exercise mostly in fun, but I did want to see how productive I could be with the limitations of the framework. The main one for me is that you have to write stuff in Python. I have used it before, but its been a while, so I had to use a lot of reference material. I gotta say, the framework is really nice for simple stuff. You can be up and productive in about 15 minutes. Concepts are easy to grasp and without having to really muck with configuration is really, really nice. The deployment is money as well. One click and done. I love that.
My implementation definitely isn’t without flaws. The first glaring one is the size of the URL. Without buying up a shorter domain name, I am stuck with probably 8 extra characters I would like to shave off (twrts.com instead of twrts.appspot.com gets rid of a period and the appspot). Oh well, if anyone actually uses it besides me, then I will look into some forwarding through a smaller domain. I also chose the simplest algorithm possible for producing the generated URL’s, meaning I am limited to only around 14,777,000 url combinations. But since I will probably be the only one using it, it should suffice ;).
It’s also interesting to note that this is pretty much the same thing that TinyURL and the other millions of services do. With my implementation though, I didn’t want to have to go to the chart’s URL in order to copy and paste it into one of those services. Just eliminates a step or two from the process. Also, I want to build in posting a message to Twitter to simplify the process even more. That should be uber simple with the twitter API.
Check it out when you get a chance.
