There are a variety of ways to accomplish this. The most straight-forward way is to run some free/open source URL shortener elsewhere on your server, and have your application use its API to generate short links.
Another way is to make a table in your database mapping some kind of ID (could be a SHA-1 of the original URL or state, or some kind of unique ID, or ...) to the URL or application state. When loaded, load that state and continue from there.
-
Thomas
"Excuse me for butting in, but I'm interrupt-driven..."