As I recently mentioned (on Twitter, does that really count?), I’m not a fan of URL shortening services. I don’t like the idea of trusting the value of links pointing to my sites to a third party. Especially since the URL shortening space itself is so sketchy. With that in mind, it was with interest that I read about the “shortlink” relation. It’s basically a scheme set up to instruct browsers and applications on the proper “short” URL to use for a document. There’s actually a competing, but similar “shorturl” specification floating around out there as well.

Whichever one wins, I approve of the concept. I want to own my own short URLs. I don’t want any Digg bars framing my site, or sneaky, link-juice stealing redirection schemes.

To that end, I’m going to set up dfst.us as my own shortening service. Right now, I’m looking at using phurl hosted on an Amazon EC2 LAMP instance.

I’m planning on writing up my progress here, so we can all learn a little bit, together.

Won’t that be fun?

First up? Setting up an EC2 instance. Initially, I’m curious as to how easy it really is. In the long-term, I’m curious as to how expensive would it be to run something like this off it over a month.

We’ll see how it goes. I know they have an instance management dashboard now, so hopefully it’s completely painless. Only time will tell 🙂