havee.ru – A URL shortener for Haveeru Online

I few days ago I was browsing Wikipedia while I somehow came across an article on domain hacks. Of course this was nothing new to me, everyone is familiar with domain hacks such as del.icio.us or goo.gl. However this got me thinking about getting my own domain hack for one of my own websites. So I went looking for what was available.

Since I was looking for exotic tLDs like .ly, .ve, .ru, etc, my usual domain registrar Godaddy wasn’t much good for the job. So a quick Google search led me to www.europeandomaincentre.com where I was able to search in bulk for the domains I was looking for. Some of the domains I looked for included maldiv.es and haba.ru. But sadly these were all taken.

Then I though of looking for havee.ru as a domain hack for Haveeru Online which is the highest traffic Maldivian website. To my delight this domain was available! Due to the huge potential of the domain I decided to buy it right away. After some searching I decided to register the domain through www.plusregister.com.

After about 10 minutes since I paid for the domain, it was registered in my name. However it took about another 24 hours before I was allowed to update the DNS settings and point the domain to my servers. And it took around 6 more hours for the DNS settings to update and propagate through most servers around the world.

Since the domain was now in my hands, I though of what I was going to do with it. My main aim was always selling the domain, however I needed to do something useful with it in the meantime so as to attract any potential buyers. So I decided to use the domain as a URL shortener for Haveeru Online.

Initially I was going to write my own URL shortening script from scratch. However after some looking around I came across YOURLS which is a php based open source URL shortening  service, so I decided to use it instead. YOURLS was easy to install and setup, however I came across a bit of a problem with the bookmarklets not working. The solution was to whitelist my server’s mod_security rule 1234234 as described here.

Finally everything is now setup and finished. Now instead of posting http://www.haveeru.com.mv/dhivehi/world/141764 to Twitter or other similar websites, you can post the shortened version http://havee.ru/m instead.

To shorten Haveeru Online links you can either use this bookmarklet [button link=”javascript:(function()%7Bvar%20d=document,w=window,enc=encodeURIComponent,e=w.getSelection,k=d.getSelection,x=d.selection,s=(e?e():(k)?k():(x?x.createRange().text:0)),s2=((s.toString()=='')?s:enc(s)),f='http://havee.ru/index.php',l=d.location,p='?url='+enc(l.href)+'&title='+enc(d.title)+'&text='+s2,u=f+p;try%7Bthrow('ozhismygod');%7Dcatch(z)%7Ba=function()%7Bif(!w.open(u))l.href=u;%7D;if(/Firefox/.test(navigator.userAgent))setTimeout(a,0);else%20a();%7Dvoid(0);%7D)()” color=”#ce0027″ size=”3″ style=”1″ dark=”0″ radius=”auto”]havee.ru[/button] or directly shorten links from havee.ru. Please note that only haveeru.com.mv links will be accepted.

I hope that Haveeru Online would embrace this service and use it when posting their links on Twitter and Facebook. After all, all major news websites in the world are already using similar services such as huff.to, reut.rs, cbsn.ws, nyti.ms, aje.me, etc.

If Haveeru Online or anyone else is interested in buying havee.ru including the url shortening service, please contact me.