4.l.to is back, but now as l.f.nu

After the unexpected breaking of the l.to sudomains, 4.l.to went down, as I explained in this post. It’s been over ten days since that domain went down, so I decided to move 4.l.to to another domain, consequently renaming it (of course, duh!). After lots of searching of the FreeDNS domain catalog, I finally found another domain name that was just as long as 4.l.to, and happened to have a one-letter subdomain available.

So I registered l.f.nu. It’s my “new” URL shortener. All the 4.l.to shorten links work now, if you change the “4.l.to” part to “l.f.nu”. The official announcement about the change is here. While this isn’t as good as having all the 4.l.to links working again without changes, I guess it’s better than, for example, having a complete database or server crash and no backups, thus losing all the shorten URL<->long URL associations and click statistics.

l.f.nu allows for some interesting “acronym-sound-reading” results. It can be interpreted as “Linking For New Universes”, “Linking For New(s)” (if you read the “nu” as nee-yuu), or even “Linking For Nothing Useful” 🙂 . I’m sure you can come up with some new meanings too; if you happen to find an interesting one, don’t forget to post in a comment!

I also gave my URL shortener a new look. It no longer uses the default Bootstrap theme (it’s become too mainstream!), but rather the United theme from Bootswatch. And finally, I also fixed some bugs in functionality and looks (read: port the thing to the latest version of Bootstrap). There are still some things left to fix, and I plan on adding some new features one of these days.

Also, looks like the new domain l.f.nu is allowed on Twitter, while 4.l.to was not – it was marked as dangerous even though I don’t know why, perhaps it was something common to all the l.to subdomains. Looks like this domain change is better than I initially thought!

Don’t forget to comment on this relaunch of 4.l.to, which is the launch of l.f.nu!

4.l.to is down

My URL shortener, 4.l.to, is down because all the .l.to subdomains, managed through FreeDNS, are down too. There’s little information available and all I know is that the subdomain is broken since 19th March, as said on the FreeDNS subdomain management page.

There aren’t any planned times to have the service restored – as I hope you understand, this is completely out of my control. In the meantime, all the links shortened with 4.l.to, which were over 500, are broken.

If you have any information that can help find what’s the future for the l.to subdomains, don’t forget to write a comment in this post. And, if you happen to have a short URL which you don’t mind donating for URL shortening (I can share the advertisements profits), I will consider moving/renaming 4.l.to while preserving all links (since the server is up and with daily backups).