The infrastructure team of the Faculty of Computer Science (FACOM) at the Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul (UFMS) provides the academic community and the general public with a URL shortener service using the university's own domain. The service was deployed approximately six months ago.
According to Brivaldo, a professor at FACOM, the service was implemented using open-source software with some modifications, aiming to facilitate scientific publications with very long links in media that have character limitations. “Initially, we used external services to create short links, such as Google or Bit.ly, but considering the possibilities of failures or the discontinuation of these services, we implemented the shortener with our own domain. In addition, it is possible to see the number of accesses and from which countries the accesses originated”, he explained.
A URL shortener is a tool that generates a shortened representation of the address (link/URL) and redirects the visitor to the original address. The UFMS URL shortener can be accessed at: https://link.ufms.br/