June 13, 2012 / gbl08ma / 2 Comments
…it will be back with a new domain, this time paid, and things will be done for real – I promise.
What happened was that the owner of the f.nu domain took over the subdomain l.f.nu and built his own URL shortener. I tried to negotiate merging l.f.nu with f.nu, but the other party didn’t reply in enough time, so the offer is closed.
This time, I’m doing things for real, with a paid domain. Doing things for real also means doing things for real profit, but don’t worry, I won’t mine your shorten URLs with ads – on this subject, things will keep as they were before: a toolbar with one ad which is forcibly enabled after the link has more than 250 hits.
Sorry for all inconvenience; again, like it was when 4.l.to became l.f.nu, all links will work, only the domain changes (just replace l.f.nu with the new domain). About the new domain, I’ll have to keep it as a secret until at least tomorrow…
May 30, 2012 / gbl08ma / 0 Comments
I have been very busy with my offline life: school, family and friends haven’t been leaving much time left for me to blog here. When I have some free time, I try to keep up-to-date with the online communities I take part in and also work on my l.f.nu URL shortener. By the way, have I told you that l.f.nu now supports editing short links?
When you shorten a new link, you receive a random code specific to it. Keep that code saved as if it were a password, as it is the only way to edit a shorten link through its Click Statistics page (add a + symbol to the end of the shorten link, then open the tab “Manage”).
This feature about link passwords (which I call “passcodes”) is something I developed just for l.f.nu, it is not available in the standard YOURLS installation. I have no plans to make it open source right now, as I haven’t implemented the thing as a plugin, and the code is a bit unorganized.
So no, I haven’t disappeared from the online world yet. I’m just a bit more silent these days…
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!