Re: Bad Hair Day #8

sull — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 01:55:47 -0000

this looks like a good one that also can be used as a Wordpress plugin:

Re: Bad Hair Day #8

dai_vernon — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 09:44:52 -0000

I think I posted this in the wrong place before: I made a blog post about the implications for our data re: Friendfeed perhaps exploding. http://taylorheffernan.squa...

Re: Bad Hair Day #8

sull — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 02:10:21 -0000

so with this short url stuff.... i'm trying to grasp what exactly is trying to be solved.
dave, you use tr.im api but want to use your own domain so that if a change is required in the future, you can just remap your domain to a new service or just write your own code to build the feature locally.

i'm assuming that for whatever reason, you dont want to write your own url shortener/redirect func (it's very very simple to do but you know this) or install one of the open source scripts out there (ie. http://get-shorty.com/).
so you prefer to hand over this task to a 3rd party company/project like tr.im or now rp.ly.
you want them to allow you to utilize a new DNS A Record for your domain(s) that points to their IP Address and add your domain of choice to their system as a virtual host. this maps your domain to tr.im or rp.ly so you can do something like http://loose.ly/r03h which truly is http://tr.im/r03h which truly is whatever url it redirects to.
tr.im should be able to do this as a favor with no problem and roll it out to others if they desire. sounds like rp.ly (brian) may already be willing to provide this to you for $100 per year.

the next concern is data ownership. where are all your short url mappings stored? i imagine you would be satisfied with an RSS feed of all of these generated short urls so you can back them up. really simple slurping ;) you could even have an rss feed for every click. i did that in the past for email campaign trackiing.

i think it would be clever if web hosting companies like dreamhost provided a url shortener/tracker app connected to your own domains that are setup. ok, they already provide raw logs and statistics... so they would just need to toss in the shortener feature and let you install a bookmarklet and pull in the stats related to these generated links.

also depends on the type of user you are. many who use url shorteners do not care about branding the urls with their own domain or dont have a domain to begin with. and their not concerned with link rot. its all about the moment of sharing a link. others care greatly about preserving their shared links or keeping their applications working properly.

it's true that all this hoopla with url shortening is less about the func and more about fair play. bit.ly/twitter relationship killed the space but truthfully, that was inevitable and their was only a market to begin with because twitter for some odd reason did not provide their own short url feature as a convenience.

i do think every company/service/brand/project/ should use their own domains/urls and this will become more understood over time.

i also think niche usage is applicable and generally, using short domains to begin with is smart (though not always easy to aquire a good one that fits).
for example, i recently setup a url shortener/tracker specifically for Ogg media files (http://ogg.ly).

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