Another of my small personal pet projects is up: RDZR

About a three days ago I thought up of a very simple use case to tackle as a personal project: a URL "minifying", "shrinking" service. It so happened that my head was fresh-hot on web2py that I had been using for a work-related project. So, I took on the task to implement it as fast as I could -- given the natural time constraints that come with being a father of two rambunctious kids and a full-time job :) So, having which framework to use figured out, I moved to the next question: where to host it? AWS was a natural choice given that I've been using their services for about one-and-half year with very little problems. However, I  thought I'd give GAE (Google App Engine) a try given than web2py has built-in GAE deployment (including database layer for their data store). But, as it turns out, GAE doesn't offer what's, in my opinion, very basic options (like providing/renting IP addresses and assigning it to an app so that one can have DNS A-records pointing to it), as well as lack of SSL for custom domains. So, after bumping my head against their wall, I went with AWS -- and yes, it was as easy as pie to setup: fire up the instance, associate elastic IP, point Route 53 to that address and presto!  That out of the way, I tackled the code aspect. After, say, couple of hours I was done with that. About forty lines of python (although I'm sure hard-core pythonistas could compress it further through conventions and idioms) and a few tweaks to their routing it was all it took to have the whole service completed -- with error handling and all that jazz. Then came my least favorite part of the process: dealing with the presentation layer (i.e. HTML/CSS). Even though I'm using most of web2py's default layout and CSS, it was still rather annoying adding my own dash html/css to it. But that's done.

So without fanfare I present you RDZR: Yet Another URL ReDuZR. Which can be reached through http://rdzr.co (or its SSL flavor, if you prefer https://rdzr.co)

Technologies used: Python, Web2Py, SQLite, Apache + mod_wsgi + mod _ssl