Hot: Firefly 1.3.0 URL Shortener released

I’ve been doing some work on Firefly lately and tonight I’ve released version 1.3.0. If you’re using Firefly it’s recommended you upgrade to the latest and greatest version. ~ For those who missed it: Firefly is a simple URL shortener gem that can be used to host your own personal (or corporate) URL shortner on your own domain. Since Firefly is rack-based, it’s easy to deploy to Heroku or other ruby hosting providers.

What’s new

Since version 1.1.0 (released october 2010) these features have been added. I’ll just summarize those and ignore the 1.2.x release I made.

Make Barby optional to save some gems for those of us who don’t need QR code generation. [mboeh]

Added a CodeFactory to generate unique short codes (and prevent collisions with custom short codes) [ariejan]

Support for specifying one’s own preferred short codes via the API. Also, invalid URL creations return a 422 code, not 200. [mboeh]

Added GUI support for custom short codes. [ariejan]

Improved error handling / reporting [ariejan]

Minor tweaks to the web GUI [ariejan]

Use dm-mysql-adapater as default, dm-sqlite-adapter is optional [ariejan]

How to upgrade

IMPORTANT: Always make a backup of your data before you upgrade.

Simple install the latest gem version and restart your server.

gem install firefly -v1.3.0

Then restart your server. DataMapper will take care of migrating your database for you.

NOTE: Firefly is now using MySQL by default. If you were using sqlite3 before, please install the appropriate DataMapper adapater: gem install dm-sqlite-adapter

Code, Issues, Forking

Want to fork? http://github.com/ariejan/firefly