This news would be of passing interest to Gilby
I just saw a posting that mentioned that MakeAShorterLink announced that they were looking to give the site away for free to a good home. This is the message that was on the site earlier:
Seems they have found a suitable new home since the link now announces:
Too bad I didn’t know about that sooner. I’d be interested.
It looks like the announcement went up this morning and was concluded by evening. You would have had to notice it quick and act fast.
Yeah, I wonder how you found out about it. I can’t find any links to it in google, though google did cache the page this morning.
Anyways, I contacted them and told them I was interested.
It was mentioned in a newsgroup I read.
I just noticed it this evening and when I went to the site it said they had already found a home.
On another related note, I just noticed that urlx.org is having some hosting problems atm. Too much traffic for the MySQL server to handle.
Yeah, I noticed that a few days ago… and according to the date on their site, they’ve been down for a month now.
Looking at their stats on alexa, they should’ve been able to handle the traffic since it really does not take much to do a single lookup in a database. I would guess that the indexes in the database were not set up correctly, especially given the query shown in the email. If it’s an indexing problem, it’ might not be apparent on a small database, so the problem most likely didn’t really become noticable until the database got too big for it to scan through the entire thing (or a lot of it) and still be fast.
Yeah.
Confused? OK, a similar situation would be where you are trying to find a specific file in a filing cabinet. If they were in a random order, you’d have to scan through all records until you found it. If they were alphabetized, you could go more directly to that information and save time/resources. If there were only 10 records, it probably wouldn’t matter too much which way you organized it, but if you have thousands, it would.
I don’t see why MakeAShorterLink would get any traffic when compared to urlx or tinyurl… MakeAShorterLink isn’t very short!
What next, CutYourLinkSizesHere? ItsEasyToComeUpWithAShortLinkExceptWhenWeTriedToNameOurNewSite?
I think they had a masl.something that worked, but I haven’t figured out what it is. But yeah, that is a somewhat long URL, complicated even more in that the ID after the / is longer than needed.
I got an email today from a MASL user. They were looking for an alternative. They want to see the original link before being redirected to it, which is the default for MASL, so there is a reason/purpose that MASL has over my service, for some users. For security reasons, he wants this to be the default. Of course, as a company that provides a similar service to MASL, I should attempt to adapt to that need, without affecting the existing userbase, which I will do. Though, I just have to figure out what the best way is.