 Hello. Hello. Welcome everybody to session three of Splashing Around with Installatron Apps. Today, we're going to be talking about, well, first of all, thanks for joining me, Meredith. Yeah, of course. This has been really fun to watch through and even kick off with the Mecca and scaler, so I'm really, really excited to see what we've gotten stored with this session, for sure. Yeah, I'm been, I was really, I'm really been happy to see the reaction so far, too, of folks kind of chatting about, like, hey, we're using a Mecca in this way or this is a problem we run into. I expect maybe with this one, we want to have as many people with experience with it. It's kind of a weird application. Well, it's not weird, but I think it's less used than a Mecca, right? And even scaler, I would say. But, yeah, it's been really cool and to me kind of this, this application, maybe most of all of the ones we're going to talk about through this session, kind of to me demonstrates sort of like that utility of owning your own domain, right? Getting way back to like what we're about here, right? Which is sort of like, it's not just a blog, you can do all kinds of things with it and there are all kinds of reasons you may want a whole space to play with, right? So the application I'm going to talk about is called URLs or URLs. It's spelled Y-O-U-R-L-S. I think they're going for URLs. Yeah. But I will say, when I read it in my head, I'm always saying URLs in my head for some reason, so I don't know. But, yeah. And what it is, is a self-hostable link shortener. So it's basically bitly, but you can have it on your own domain. And in fact, because it's, you know, an application that works in C panel, you can kind of do all kinds of funky things with it too. I have been using URLs for kind of a long time, about as long as I've had like a reclaim hosting account, actually. It's like well before I worked here. Just for the idea of, hey, I want to make a shortened link, but I want to have it at my own domain name because domain names are cool. And I think the second big one is it lets me change things after the fact. So one of the things, if you use link shorteners a lot, like bitly, if not every service lets you change a link after you've already created it. So I think bitly does if you have an account and there's like certain circumstances to it. But as an example, but this happens all the time. I'll say this happened to me all the time, like especially when I was a teacher, because I would like make a short link for something that I wanted my students to go visit or if I'm helping faculty too, like if I'm aiding teaching process and then it's like, oh, we have to update that to move someplace else. Now we need to make an entirely different link. Like we can't change that old one. Using something that you actually control, like URLs, you can just update the link. The other thing, if you're unfamiliar with link shorteners in the audience, the other thing that's great about them is also for like QR codes. So if you want to make a QR code like you're making a poster or something, you can make a QR code directly to the link that you're wanting people to visit, of course. But that has the same problem. If something changes about that link, then you got to print new posters. So anytime I make a QR code for something, I use URLs to actually generate a shortened link and the QR code goes to that. That way, in the worst case where, oh man, we messed up. We have to go to a different URL. Maybe it's a new Google Doc or new Zoom link or something, where you don't have a lot of control over what that link looks like. This can save you from having to reprint 300 posters and putting them all up over campus or whatever. So I'm a big fan of tools like this and URLs in particular is great because you get to control the whole usage of it, including what the domain name is. So looking at the website really quick, they have a pretty basic, they kind of don't like, they say, hey, it's a URL shortener. That's about all they say about what it actually is in terms of the functionality. It, you know, it works on Apache PHP and MySQL. So it works in cPanel or shared hosting or domain of one's own. It's, there's kind of not a lot else to know about actually using it. So we will spend some time today installing it, talking about some of the things to know about, but like using it is pretty simple. And they also have a GitHub page. If you're curious to look at that, it kind of similarly says almost nothing about using it, but, you know, hey, it's an option. So I kind of wanted to jump right into installing it and kind of looking at what this thing actually looks like. So I'm signed into my cPanel here for my main account. And I already do have an install that we can talk about a little bit, but so I have one at this domain I got very recently actually called wis.cx. I got it because it's really short. So it's really great for URL shorteners, obviously. And that's cool. But you don't have to have a dedicated domain to install it on, of course, just like anything else in installatron, you can put it on a sub domain or a sub folder. So before I got this domain, wis.cx, I actually just had it at link.jadon.me, which is my, jadon.me is my main domain. And that was fine. I used that way for many years. It wasn't particularly short, but it was very pronounceable, which is nice. If you're telling someone a domain, it goes link.jadon.me slash whatever I wanted to call it. So the other thing you can do, it's kind of cool, is you can put it in a sub directory as well. So again, just like anything else in installatron. So this is potentially how I would do it now, because I love the idea of maybe putting it under, say, a WordPress site or something. So you could have like your main blog, let's say it's jadon.me, put it at slash l, right? Just one letter. That doesn't really increase the URL length that much and allows you to handle all of these short links and redirects and stuff in this application design specifically for it, which is kind of neat. It also kind of just creates like a good, almost seamless experience, with the sub folders. I like that a lot, that idea. Yeah, I think that's how I would do it now. And in fact, I actually have a redirect set up on my site to go jadon.me slash l goes to my main URL, URL, URL's thing. But I picked the option to do a wildcard redirect. So basically, I can tell I'm digging in the weeds. I'll save this for actually using it in a second, but I can choose either place to use it, which is kind of cool. So to install this thing, you're going to go to the tools section here, or applications, I mean, and then all applications. And I always just search for it, to be perfectly honest. It's somewhere in this list, but we're just going to search for it. And there we go, URLs, and we'll install. And so you can pick a domain here. I'm, I've got like a demo subdomain I like to use for things that are temporary. So I'm going to install it there. But keep in mind that maybe you want to put it on its own subdomain, or maybe you want to put it under another application. I'm going to keep the book, the bookmarks directory that sounds good to me, I'll keep it at bookmarks. So my install will live at demo.jaden.me slash bookmarks. There's not much to put in here or other applications or other things to ask. I will have it update to any new version that's cool. I'm going to make a username and password. So let me do that. And email is good. Title doesn't really matter. No one else is going to see it theoretically, but I'll, I'll, how about we do my public URLs? That's fine. And then this is one that is unique. So it says public access. Allow anyone to access application or require administrator password. What this is controlling is whether other people other than you who has the admin password, can they make links? You probably want this to be no, because otherwise anyone can make a shortened URL on your domain. Maybe you are okay with that. You could also combine it with something like, I was going to say with Apache's, with the, with the directory privacy thing, but, but that's putting a password on it. So I don't, I don't know why I personally can't think of a situation where you would want this to be. Yes. Unless you're like, I'm going to take on Bitly. I think you could do this with like a club on campus or something like that. Or like, if you're on, if you're doing a class project, I think this would be a good idea to allow for just a little bit of time. But I think leaving it open for an extended period of time is, is not best practice in that side. Yeah. And you, you will have to, like if you wanted to change it later, you have to go into a config file and change it. You can't change it from install, trying again, unless you uninstall it and reinstall it, which at which point all of your URLs are gone. Right. So, right. So I think almost everyone's going to want this to be no. And then, you know, you could always share the password with people who want to use it. Or you could do this. Yes. And have it be temporary, but keep in mind, like it's open to spammers now. So that could be not great. I'm actually going to install it both ways, just to show you all what it looks like. So we're going to do a public one first. That's why I called it my public URLs and install. I should have had a counter for how many different ways I'm going to pronounce URLs today. I was joking when we were planning this that URLs sounds like the Yanny and Laurel like debate with the sounds, like I'll have to put a link to the YouTube channel or the YouTube video in the chat. But at one point there was just some audio that like sounded a different way. It sounded like Laurel, which to me like equates to URLs. So it was funny. Yeah. So it installs really quickly. It's tiny. It's only like 10 megabytes of stuff in there. And that's the URL it's at demo.jadin.me slash bookmarks. And here we go. So you can see I am I'm not logged in right now. But the actual URL becomes this public, hey, maybe you want to make a bookmark page. So this is open to anyone. You can, I mean, making a bookmark itself is very simple, right? So let's say I wanted to link to, I don't know, a particular actually, here's a good example here. I'm going to go to our our documentation here. And I'll just pick a random article. And, you know, I've got this long URL here. So maybe I want to make this shorter. Now, I know because I work here that I can actually cut off most of this URL, but most of the time you don't know. So I want to shorten that because maybe I need to print, you know, maybe I need to be referencing this in like a workshop and I want to put it on a slide so people can type it into their phone or something. And then you can optionally name it. So if you don't, it's going to randomly generate something. I like naming them personally. So I usually will. So what was this even about again? Something with light speed. I'll put light speed in the name. How about bookmark slash light speed? And you can give it an optional title as well. This is mostly usable in the back end. You hit shorten. And there you go. You get a short link. It also gives you like a nice little, like, hey, you know, maybe you want to post this to Twitter or Facebook, I guess. It's going to put the title of the webpage in here. And a lot of times you'll get a weird title because of the way things work. So it says security check. That's just because our Zendesk is like, that seems like not a real person. So it puts a little security check up there. But most of the time you're just going to copy this link. So now I can go to demo dot jaden dot emmy slash bookmarks slash light speed. And there we go. So now that that link works great. There are also these handy bookmark lists, which is cool. So you can drag these into your bookmarks bar and use them. I personally don't use these, but if I was making a lot, I would. You can do a default one, which will just bring you to the page custom. Actually, these aren't working right now because I'm on a page. So if I drag these in, that's fine. They're just variations on the similar thing. So basically, if I go to maybe another support article here, that's bad. Don't want to go to tickets. You get a little, a little view of our admin interface. Yeah. So let's go to here. So if I hit default here, it's just going to open up the actual bookmark list. Oh, I wonder if these are not working anymore. You can also do a custom URL. So what this will do is it will automatically fill in. Yeah, it's funny. I think it might be something with my Firefox like security settings, but these bookmark bookmark lists aren't working. But what it should do is pre fill these fields for you basically. So the default one will just pre fill the URL in so you can hit shorten. The custom one will pre fill the URL. And then whatever you type as the custom URL will go in there. And then the other two are simply going to the other two are simply going to do the same thing, but in a little pop up window, which again, isn't going to work because of my security settings, but it's basically the same thing. I could see using these, but personally, I prefer to just go and log in and make them. I'm not making these multiple times a day or anything like that. But it is kind of cool that they come out of the box with some with some bookmark lists that you can use. So that's the public one. I'm actually going to delete this one now. And we're going to make it again, but not public because there's kind of a trick with this. So if I go in here and actually I need to check that we'll uninstall this. And if you're working with multiple people on this, can you create more than one administrator user? I have never done that. And as far as I know, you can, but there isn't a facility to do it in the actual application. So it's kind of weird, but I think you'd have to make it in the database. So my suggestion would be that if you wanted to do multiple people with this, I would honestly just share a password because what you're doing is sharing a password for something that's pretty low risk, right? Like there's no access to email or other applications or anything like that. However, you also could consider making more than one, right? Like you could make several installs. They have to live at their own URLs, of course, but like you could make several if that was a concern. So yeah, URLs is very basic. Like it really only does this one thing. So yeah, there's no facility to make more accounts in the actual interface. And we'll look at the admin interface in a second because I have to log into this one that I'm about to make. So yeah. All right. So I'll do this again. I'll set my username and password up. I'll just leave this title the same. This time I'm going to say no, no public access. Okay. So now with no public access, if I go to the URL, it's going to look like this, which is not great. So what's happened here is the page we were just looking at, the public page where you can make a bookmark, it just simply didn't make that file. And it was an index.php file. Because there's no file called index, Apache, the web server, is just going to be like, cool. Here's the files and folders in that folder you asked for. So this is not great. Now, if I go back to the thing here and click on this admin link, that works. Nothing's broken. It's just URLs is very basic. So if I go to admin here and log in with my password, username and password, here we go. I've got my login. We haven't seen this before, but this is the interface. And it's very similar. It just shows here, here you can make a URL. Here's all of the ones you've made before. It comes with some default ones for some reason. But that's kind of it. You can track from here the number of clicks and what IP, this would be the IP that is the server you're going to. I'm not really sure why you care about this, to be honest, but it is there. And if you go in here and I go to tools, that's where you can now look at your bookmarklets that I was mentioning before. There are some other ones that will give you ready to go post for Facebook or Twitter, which is kind of interesting. And then there's some information about the API, because it does have an API, which is kind of cool. I've never used that, but that's interesting that has one. There's also plugins. So the plugins are kind of like Omega where you have to go find them and upload them to the file manager to use them. And perfectly honest, I've never used a plugin. I don't have any of them activated. Maybe I would use this one that allows hyphens. But this is such a simple thing, like what other functionality do you want? Now, you can go to the plugin list, and I was looking at this earlier, and they have a GitHub repository specifically collecting a bunch of plugins. And there are some interesting ones. There's one that adds two-factor authentication, so that's kind of cool. I could see potentially using that if you're concerned about the security of it. There are some different ones that let you do like capture links to prevent spam, which could be great if you have a public URL like we were just talking about. There's ones that let you do things like put an Amazon affiliate link tag in if you're doing Amazon affiliate stuff. There's some things that extend the API, but like, okay, this one's interesting. It lets you bulk import from a CSV file. So maybe you're importing from some other service you used to use. I could see that be interesting to do. But pretty perfectly honest, I think most people aren't needing a lot of this, but I like to point out that, hey, there are plugins, they do exist. Do you have a ton more than I thought they would have? Yeah. There's so much you can do with it. Wow. I even love this. Change your password from within URLs. That's a plugin. Normally, you have to edit the configuration file. So yeah, there's a ton of plugins. URLs is somewhat popular, is my understanding. It's been around a long time. And if you're going to self-host something like this, this is the option. There's not a lot of other things that do link shortening. I mean, there could be, but there hasn't been, I think, a lot of industry need for someone to be like, oh, I want to write my own version of this. It's like, okay, what do you want it to do? It's a pretty simple thing. There's a lot of plugins, but I've never personally needed to play with them. That's interesting. There's LDAPs. You could do a single sign-on for your URLs. That's crazy. That would be cool for a school. I could see doing that. I don't know 100% if an IT department would want to sign up for integrating it with that. It's one thing to integrate with WordPress. It's such a popular thing. We at Reclaim have a lot of expertise with it. URLs is obviously more niche. This is kind of neat that you can actually use this to generate QR codes right in URLs. I actually want to try this one. I don't know that I'll try it on recording here because I've never used it, but this is one thing I was noticing just before we started recording. I was like, oh, that would be cool to have it generate the QR code instead of me having to go use, usually I use a Firefox extension to do that, which is fine, but it would be kind of cool to not even need that. There's a lot of plugins. You upload them to the file manager very much like Omega, and that's kind of it. Then you can activate them within the interface here. That's what the admin interface looks like. I've logged in. I can delete a link here. I can actually look at more statistics here, which is kind of interesting. If I use this one here, so it's ozh. That would be mo.jdn.me slash bookmarks slash ozh. That's redirected. If I refresh here, you'll see that it actually logged to that. That's kind of cool. You can get that basic kind of analytics stuff. I can see traffic statistics, location, which is kind of interesting. Sources, it'll have refer data if someone clicked on it from something like Facebook or Twitter, and then share just another thing that gives you access to the link. That's the basic of using it once you've logged in. How do we fix the issue of, hey, this is at demo.jdn.me slash bookmarks, and I don't want people who decide to visit that URL to get this display? Really simple fix, actually. You can just fix this yourself in the file manager is what I've done. I go back to my C panel and open up the file manager, and never mind my very, very messy hosting account bookmarks. I went to the folder where URLs is installed. In my case, it's in demo.jdn.me slash bookmarks. I'm just going to make an index file here so that Apache, the web server, has something to display. I'm going to go to file. I'm going to make a new file called index.html. If you're a PHP person, you could write an index.php and do that instead if you wanted to. Honestly, if I do nothing, I've already kind of fixed it. If I just make the file, now at least, instead of having that directory list, it's just a blank page. That's, I think, better. What I like to do is actually redirect this to something else. That way, if someone's found a short link, to me, this is mitigating the curious person who sees like, oh, interesting, demo.jdn.me slash bookmarks slash OZH, what's that the actual base URL? It's to mitigate that curiosity. I like to use a simple HTML meta redirect or refresh, I think it technically is. I had this bookmark and I'm just pulling it up now. We can just throw this one line into that file and it will redirect people from that page we just made to wherever we want to go. If I go back here in my index and paste that in, it's going to say, hey, refresh. This is the amount of time. This means immediately, I don't know why, but you could make the browser wait for three seconds before it goes someplace else. I don't know why you'd do that, but you could. Then you're telling it and go to this URL. In my case, maybe I'm just going to have it go to my blog. If they try to visit my URL, my URLs installed directly, just redirect them back to my blog. If I hit save and then go to this URL again, bam, now it goes to jayden.me. That won't affect in any meaningful way the ability to make bookmarks because I can still go to demo.jayden.me slash bookmarks slash admin and of course log in. I'm already logged in, but I can still do that. That's cool. That's how I like to use it because I do want to log in on it, and I don't like that it has that, by default, the display of folders and files otherwise. That's my little hack around that problem. Yeah, I don't know. Anything else questions about that weird hack? Yeah, I did actually have a question based on this. Do you still have the same bookmark options like the custom default pop up, all that sort of stuff? Could you bypass having to log in every time on the private by just bookmarking the simple or the custom bookmark? You still have to log in. If you give someone the bookmarklet, unfortunately, it's still loading the webpage for the admin interface, so they still will have to log in. There is, I think theoretically, a way to do this. If you wanted to make something that someone could make, someone you trusted could make shortened URLs without sharing the password with them, theoretically, you could do something with this API here. I am not, by any means, an API expert, but it's important to keep in mind that typically API requests are just URLs that you are requesting. If you look here, it says, hey, usage of a signature token, and it says this is a secret signature token. What this is is sort of replacing logging in. They are saying, hey, you can just use it as a parameter, and this is the URL. It's demo.jn.me slash bookmark slash URLs API signature, and then action equals, and then dot, dot, dot. Something. My point is, if you wanted to read up on the passwordless API, it's possible you could make your own bookmarklet that did that, basically. It just doesn't come out with it out of the box, and I've never tried it to be clear, so I don't know that it works, but I think that should, my understanding is you wouldn't have to go very far to do that. Basically, it would be a little bit of reading of the documentation here on what these parameters could be, but basically, they would go to this URL with the signature, action equals, let's say it's like shortened, and then URL equals HTTPS, jn.me. It would be something like this, I guess is my point. All you have to do is make a bookmarklet that goes there, basically. You could even make the cool thing that it has an API, something I haven't played with URLs much, is you could even, because it has a pretty straightforward API, you could even do interesting automation things with it, have it integrate with gravity forms, or a Zapier in some way. I don't know what you would do, but you could imagine maybe you've got a gravity form, and you upload a picture to it, and then it returns to you via email or something, Zapier sends you a shortened link to that image file or something like that. It's really cool to me to see that they have API support built right in, which is really interesting. I've never used it, it's kind of outside of what I need it for, but it is there. I think it's kind of interesting to keep that in mind. There's not a lot to say about this thing. I'll make a couple other links, I guess, just to mention it. It is such a simple thing, but I think potentially really powerful in getting folks to not have to rely on a service they don't have control over. I've seen people pay for Bitly Pro just so that they could have a certain amount of private links or changeable links, and it's like, yeah, or you can do that, but doing this right on a domain you already own and are already using makes so much sense to me. I think it's kind of a cool option. Let me make here, let's set one here. This one will go right to setting up two-factor authentication right in the logging in step. I'll grab that URL, make another one here, and we'll call this 2FA. I feel like the possibilities here are kind of endless. I've worked in places where we had a web developer make our own custom URL shortener thing, and then that was used internally and externally for a long time. And nowadays that would be just silly. I don't know why you would do that when you can use something like this. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, anything else? It's going to be, I think, a short one. Yeah, it's super short. I think this is really cool. I was completely, I hadn't really ever heard of this until now, and so I'm super excited to see what it is, and I'm honestly going to go look at the list of plugins and see if I can try to figure out some of them. Yeah, I'm going to definitely set up the QR code one, and I'll put notes in the Discord about what I find out. I just don't want to try it right. I don't want to waste everyone's time right now and find out that it doesn't work or something like that because I haven't used it before, but that to me seems like a cool one. And yeah, I love this as like a little break kind of between, we're going to talk about next week, we're going to talk about Matomo, which is an analytic suite, and it's also not really the same thing as Scalar and Omeca, right? Scalar and Omeca are content management systems like WordPress. I guess Yorls has content and it manages the content, but not really, right? And Matomo is different too, in that it's not a web publishing kind of thing, or at all, or blogging software or anything like that. But this one is so delightfully simple. It's a little cupcake of an application. I just love it. Yeah, for sure. That's a good analogy. Now I'm going to think about that at lunch. You can tell I'm hungry. So yeah, well, thanks for joining me, Meredith, and thanks for everyone who watched this little demo of the possibilities of your running your own link shortener on your domain. So yeah, sounds good. Awesome. We'll see you all next week. Bye. See you.