Question

I would like to display a shortened URL besides the content items on my site for ease of sharing.

What would be the most efficient way of doing so, and are there any suitable gems / libraries?

I am using rails on a mongodb/mongoid stack

Answer 1

should be simple enough (regardless if you are on Mongo / MySQL or anything else). what you need is a small collection (mongo if i may) that holds some kind of an MD5 hash of the real url you are after and the real url itself, for example:

ShortLink.create(:hash_link => Digest::MD5.hexdigest(resource_url(@resource)), :real_link => resource_url(@resource))

I suggest adding another route that catches those like this:

match "l/:key", "ShortLinks#show"

should be easy.