How to shorten S3\Paperclip URL in Rails

Question

We are trying to fit link to video in Twitter feed and even with short DNS, it needs to be shorter:

http://domain.com/videos/164/original.mp4

I guess you could change the paperclip attachment name from videos to just v and buy a few chars but has anyone came up with a better way to shorten S3\\Paperclip style links in Rails?

It doesn't seem to be anything you can do in routes as it's at S3 at this point.

Any good idea appreciated.

Answer 1

I use the bitly gem at https://github.com/philnash/bitly

super easy to configure and use!

Add to gem file

gem 'bitly'

run bundler

bundle

create an account at [https://bitly.com/][1]

create config/initializers/bitly.rb and add the configuration info

Bitly.configure do |config|
  config.api_version = 3
  config.login = "Bitly_Username"   # <--- from the account you created above
  config.api_key = "API_KEY"        # <--- from the account you created above
end

restart your rails app and start using the gem as follow

bitlink = Bitly.client
bitlink = bitly.shorten("http://www.howtomovetomaui.com/blogs/super_long_link_page_history_one/this_will_never_stop/ET-want-to-go-home.html", :history => 1)

I use it in my model to update twitter from my site so I have a after_save call as follow

after_save :update_twitter, :on => :new

def update_twitter
  // code goes here
end 

Hope that helps..

Answer 2

You might try the 'shortly' gem. It supports quite a few different url shortening services.

• https://rubygems.org/gems/shortly
• https://github.com/bagwanpankaj/shortly