The difference in speed between my day job and the after hours hacking I do is sometimes mind-boggling. My day job is a typical “day job”. Anything of note takes time to happen. I’m cool with that.

I’m also cool with what happens at home. Where I can get an idea, hit Google for some quick research and get on with the business of making it happen.

Case in point, I registered dfst.us yesterday– before I even googled “php based URL shortener”– and about 30 hours later (only about 2 of which was actual coding- tweaking the easy-to-use phurl script) I’m sitting here with my own personal URL shortening service.

It’s not quite ready for prime time (although it works: http://dfst.us/k.) I’ve still got a few kinks to code through. For one thing, while it’s just for me, I’d still like the design to be improved. Nothing crazy, of course, I’d just like it to feel like one of my sites.

Beyond that I still need to do some more work in terms of getting the overall package together. One of the key pieces in that puzzle is capturing the generated short url and presenting it using the proposed rel="shortlink" microformat. I’m already capturing it (manually, as a WordPress custom field, for now, but eventually phurl will have an API to generate them automatically), I just need to rework templates across a few domains to present the data in the head of the document.

And then? I’ll be happy for about half a day to have gained a little bit more control over the shortened URL drama and then I’ll look for some other improvement to make around my sites. What other answer would you expect? 🙂