Old (very old) UShorten links conversion

Roland,
Wow, a blast from the past It's been a while since we heard about UShorten. I'm glad to hear it's worked well for you after all this time.

Unfortunately, as you can probably already guess, we aren't upgrading that extension to Joomla 2.5+ However, I think with a simple MySQL query, you can export your current short URLs and add them to your .htaccess file to recreate the same redirections. It will take a little work and testing, but should be possible.

So, open up a MySQL query tool, like PHPMyAdmin. Then, run the following command:MySQL doesn't always allow the INTO OUTFILE, depending on your permissions. So, you may need to change that query, but hopefully, that gets you started.

The output will be clean statements you can just throw into your .htaccess file anywhere after the RewriteEngine On statement. They'll look like:

RewriteRule ^a8X$ YOURDOMAIN.com/long-url.html [R=301,nc,L]

Hopefully, that all makes sense and/or you have a developer you can hand these instructions off too. It shouldn't be too bad... hopefully.

Thanks, and good luck,
Alex

Roland,
You can actually do thousands of redirects in .htaccess. Apache can slice through that file like sliced butter. That's not to say there won't be any speed hit, but my guess is that it will be pretty small (under .25s). So, yes, a 'hit', but that's something you can weigh the benefits of.

One other option is to update that query above to only pull down the short URLs with >100 (or 1000) hits, for example. That way, some users may get 404's, but the important pages will have redirects.

Hope that helps, and keep us posted on what you find. Curious to hear how it goes,
Alex