March 30, 2012 / gbl08ma / 0 Comments
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!
March 21, 2012 / gbl08ma / 0 Comments
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).
September 29, 2011 / gbl08ma / 0 Comments
First of all, sorry for posting nothing on this blog for more than a month. The truth is, school has started, I’ve got to study, after studying I have lots of other things to do, and, in general, posting on this blog has been the last of the priorities. It’s also true that during this month I didn’t come with something worth a blog post. However, in the last days some online events made me direct some attention to this blog and the server it is hosted in.
Some days ago, Pingdom started reporting that gbl08ma.cz.cc was down… and down… and down… not only gbl08ma.cz.cc, but also all the cz.cc domains were down for more than 48 hours – and continue to be, and will never come back up – I explain later. After more than 48 hours of consecutive downtime (and an email inbox full of Pingdom alters), I decided it was time to “wake up” and take some action.
So, I went searching. I knew that everything cz.cc was down, that was a fact. After no more than 30 seconds of Googling, I see the expressions “takes offline”, “cz.cc domains”, “Microsoft” and “Kelihos Botnet” on the same headline.
Before we continue, let me explain: I knew Microsoft and its “secure internet” partners had taken the Kelihos botnet down some days ago, I just didn’t know how that was related to cz.cc subdomains. So don’t take me for as so uninformed as you might think.
…turns out that Microsoft and its partners took the cz.cc domain service down along with the Kelihos botnet. OK, I had assumed this would happen anytime soon, the point is that it just happened before I thought it would be, and it happened before my eyes. So, cz.cc was taken down, after being considered as being a Kelihos partner and containing other multiple issues (we all know the lots of spam and scams operated from cz.cc domains, right?).
Well. Yesterday I was a bit angry with Microsoft, but now I think it was a great thing after all: they shut a bad thing off the internet, while forcing me not to use that horrible domain service anymore. For me, the biggest hassle is updating the URL of this blog on all places I left it. The ideal solution to this free domain problem was to buy a real top-level domain and get off with gbl08ma.com or gbl08ma.net, but as I don’t have enough money to buy a TLD yet, I just moved to the very-reliable and reputable freedns.afraid.org (unlike cz.cc, it isn’t associated with badware or spam).
Plus, afraid.org has some great points compared to cz.cc: since Google banned them from search results, this blog could not be listed on Google; now with afraid.org, I’m still not listed on Google by default, but I can bother Joshua Anderson, the FreeDNS admin, to whitelist this website and allow Google to index it, like he did with my 4.l.to URL shortener. (to Joshua Anderson: if you’re reading this, smile 🙂 ).
There’s even another great thing, apart from not being associated with the “dark side” of the ‘net. The FreeDNS domain I chose is even shorter than the previous one!
Conclusion: The URL for this blog is now http://gbl08ma.l.to. (not anymore, read last update)
I’m progressively updating all references to gbl08ma.cz.cc on the internet to gbl08ma.l.to, as long as it’s under my control; if you ever linked to this website, please update your links; remember to update your bookmarks too, if you had any. Starting now, forget gbl08ma.cz.cc and update your mind to use gbl08ma.l.to. I thank you for not associating this little blog with Kelihos, since it was never associated and never will.
See you!
Gabriel
EDIT: I was trying to configure WP to Twitter plugin to work with the new URL, and at the Twitter developers center, I just discovered that Twitter thinks that l.to domains are malware, too. Damn! What free domains aren’t considered as malware?! I need a TLD… please… oh damn, I can’t pay.
EDIT2: As you should be noticing, the blog is now on a .com domain. So the accurate URL is http://gbl08ma.com