UPES student and professors develop unique URL shortner

ANU-URL is a URL shortener that has make a mark in the crowded segment of URL shorteners available to us today

Suyash Thakur, third year student, B.Tech CSE specialization in Graphics and Gaming, from UPES School of Computer Science , Dr. Ashish Karn, Assistant Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering, UPES School of Engineering, and Pankaj Badoni, Assistant Professor, UPES School of Computer Science, have developed an indigenous and innovative URL shortener. ANU-URL is a URL shortener that stands out in the crowded segment of URL shorteners available to us today. ANU-URL comes with nine unique features that will attract anyone who deals with webs and weblinks.

1. ANU-URL service provides you with an alternative for cumbersome links that you may come across.
2. ANU-URL helps individuals, academicians, and professionals to keep a record of their details, documents, or other confidential data. The URL will help individuals share heavy data with others easily. For instance, course material can be shared on a cloud location. 
3. Through ANU-URL, you can create truly unique personalized URLs for yourself, called ‘URL directories’. These URLs will be easy to recollect and share with others.
4. To sign up for an ANU-URL, you could use your Google Account to log in or use the guest login feature as an alternative.
5. Once you have signed up, you are directed to a ‘Create Link’ page, where you can generate ANU-URLs using a keyword, if the keyword is not already taken. Further, you can also check all the URLs created by you in the past, search for them, edit them or relink them to a different webpage or even disable them.
6. This URL editing feature can serve several useful applications. For instance, the same link can be used for a variety of chronological operations such as online review and result declaration of the research proposals. The same link can take the user to the Google form for submission of his proposal, to a Zoom meeting during panel evaluation, and later to the result document after a few days.
7. ANU-URL has an analytics feature as well. You can track the number of hits and engagement on your URL. This can be used to gauge, for example, the student’s response to a particular theme or aspect of the course.
8. ANU-URL allows you to set an expiration date/time stamp for every URL you create so that you can deactivate a URL whenever you want. This is beneficial to auto-set deadlines for a task since the submission link remains valid only within a certain timeframe. If one does not opt for an expiry date, the link never expires.
9. ANU-URL can provide for ease of tracking in organisations such as a list of publications of different departments, a consistent link for all departmental meetings, links for various NAAC and NBA document repositories. Most importantly, it is worth looking at how such a scheme may be extremely useful to bring together different components of a conference stored inside an internal repository.

Talking about the unique development, Dr. Ashish Karn says, “Currently, most of the players in this domain are not Indian. The idea behind this project was to develop an indigenous tool, better in terms of quality and features to be used by educationists and the masses in general. Although there are many such tools in the market, ANU-URL has an edge over others in terms of features, simplicity, and cost-effectiveness. As developers of this tool, we want this tool to assist in simplifying your life with the conundrum of the web links that you may be inevitably forced to deal with. We are ready to resolve any technical issues that users may face.”

Pankaj Badoni, UPES School of Computer Science says, “What we have developed is a working prototype that can be adopted by any organisation worldwide. I try to engage my students in projects that are beneficial for people. This URL is an example of one such project.”