Well, after one day of tinkering, I think I have the system in place now to take long urls and convert them to shorter and easier to type into a browser urls. I was even able to change the code so that only websites with the domain dearbornschools.org are able to be added to the service. This makes it better because we wouldn’t want outsiders using the service inappropriately. The software used was from a great site I found called plusphp.com. If you’d like a copy of what I created with domain filtering, just contact me and be sure to thank the creator at plusphp.com.
Here’s what it does…You type in the long url in the top field of the form. Then you enter a keyword such as “biology”. It then takes the long url and turns it into something like this:
https://mysite.dearbornschools.org/?biology
Check it out:
https://mysite.dearbornschools.org
Try my demo by copy and pasting this url in your browser and look for the url that it takes you to:
https://mysite.dearbornschools.org/?chris
As you can see, this solves the problem of the teacher who creates a website that has a URL that is so complicated parents or students give up trying to get it right by typing it out.
It’s a very useful tool! If you’d like a copy of what I did, I’d be happy to zip it up and send it to you. It doesn’t require a database either.