Brontesaurus Blog

I never had any expectations for biturl because I made it primarily for me, but to my suprise people actually use it. I never promoted the site in any way other than getting my friends to use it and just using it myself. Also today I had the pleasure of getting the first bug written up and fixing for biturl so I thought I might share some statistics.

Last month I started taking snapshots of certain statistics because I wanted to see just how much traffic was coming in on a day by day basis. This information is taken over 11 days recording total number of redirects (when somebody clicks on a biturl link) and number of url’s hashed.

From the data above biturl was seeing on average 35 new urls a day and 1,160 redirects a day. Now of course that data has probably gone up. At the time of logging this dataset biturl had a total of 1864 url’s hashed and a total of 42,343 and as of right now biturl has 66,702 redirects 2,759 url’s with the top 3 having 1,000+ hits.

I might eventually parse my access logs and make a google maps representation of where the traffic is coming from like I did before with iptables.

I fixed some things on the back end of Biturl that I known have not exactly been broken, but not really working as you would expect either. These “bugs” have been there since the conception of Biturl and I have finally been able able to address them. Also I made the way that url’s are stored a little more robust and applied it to all url’s currently hashed and any new urls that come in too.

Of course as always, if you find a bug, or something doesn’t work how you would like it to, or just want to complain about how terrible of a service it is, feel free to right up a bug report or contact me via twitter.

I have a lot more planned for this service so stay tuned.

Biturl is still a very young website being officially announced on January 30th of 2009. I created this service for myself above anything because I was tired of these slow, bloated, url shortening services that in my opinion all just suck. My entire inspiration behind this project is “no bullshit”. All I want to do is enter a big url and get a tiny one in return. I really never expected anyone to use it, but a couple people on twitter have picked it up which led me to believe, maybe I got something here.

Here are some quick side by side comparisons of biturl’s site design and functionality versus the other url shortening services out there. All the clutter aka “bullshit” and unnecessary areas of the site are marked in red squigles. 

Tinyurl

vs

Bit.ly

vs

Tr.im

vs

Poprl

vs

Hex.io

 vs

And probably the worst offender of all is Ow.ly. Their front page its very simple and I would like this service but….

when a url is forwarded they put this ridiculously obnoxious toolbar on top of the site you want to view. Invasive much?

Though there are a couple sites who’s design I do like such as is.gd and twurl. My intention with biturl isnt to attract users, or make money, or even really make a great service with a ton of features, it was to make a simple fast service, and to keep it that way. A lot of people think its just yet another url shrinker and it is to some extent, I just wanted to point out the differences in biturl versus the others.

I recently moved Biturl to a new VPS host over at slicehost. So far I am very pleased with it and the site seems to be lightning fast. Other than being faster this allows me to open the site to api extensions because I have full control over the machine. 

Feel free to contact me via email or twitter if you run into any problems.

More to come.

http://biturl.cc – No bullshit url shortening

http://biturl.cc

This a little url shrinking service I came up with as a side project. Now I know there are a billion other services but a lot of them are really kind of cluttered and I am kind of a control freak when it comes to these things and I thought it would be something fun to do on the side. I also intend to use this as a Ruby on Rails learning project later on.

So the underlying principle with this service is just “no bullshit”. No ads, no big ass clunky interface that fills the entire page. One form, one button, one result. There is a simple REST based api that just returns a straight string. It is bloody simple to implement into any service, take a look at the api documentation http://api.biturl.cc/.

Here’s and example PHP + Curl implementation (taken and modified from twitme wordpress plugin).

$ch = curl_init();
 
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,"http://api.biturl.cc/rest.php?u=$url");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOBODY, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
 
$sResponse     = curl_exec($ch);
$iResponseCode = (int)curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);
 
if ($iResponseCode != 200) return $url;
return $sResponse;