wynd.me

Captcha is now in place to attempt to reduce the amount of spam links that are script created through this site.  This is fantastic news for me but I’m sure some users of this site will be none too pleased.  For me it means that the lion share of work this site does is no longer being done to service automated scripted URL creations, and the database bloat should slow down considerably.  For you, the user of this site, it means an eye test of squinting at some letters every time you make a link.  I won’t go into any technical details of what it is or why it works, but for those of you that are interested in a bit more detail, I’ve prepared a little bit of info and it is available on the Help Captcha page.

I am honestly sorry it had to come to this.  I am not a big fan of Captcha either, but with almost 50,000 links shortened by this site, and less than 2500 of them not spam, well, I really had no choice.  Related to this effort was a human powered purge of spam links.  It wasn’t perfect I’m sure, but it did kill off a lot of really obvious garbage.  They are still in the database for good measure, but they are now flagged as inactive links.  Inactive links can no longer be followed, peeked at, or listed on anything more elaborate than a count.

Also, while I was in there I wrote up a little Credits Page to give credit where it is due.

So here I am, running a URL shortening web site that gets something like 2000 new URLs a day.  That’s pretty cool, even if there are spam links in the mix.  Mysteriously however (ok, not that mysterious really) I only get something like 5 to 10 page views a day for Google AdSense.  In other words, someone, or some collection of someones I suppose, has invented a fun way to shorten URLs without actually hitting any of my pages in a way that would trigger Google Ads to load.  Frankly, that’s just not cool.  I’m one of very few URL shorteners that really doesn’t filter the links much at all, so I honestly expect there to be some amount of spam links clogging things up.  The problem is that without page views, real ones that use my system properly,  I don’t earn any money on this site.  The reality of that means that someday I’ll just get frustrated and will shut the site down.  That’s not what I want to do, but no income dictates pretty clearly what is actually possible.

So, if you use the site, please use it properly.  Seeing 2000 URLs make 7 page views, and $0.00 in a day will not keep this system running.  Thank you.

A smart engineer somewhere once said something like “Don’t build it for millions of users, build it so it works.  If the millions of users come, fix it at that time.  Otherwise you’ll never get your product out the door.”  This was the idea behind this site.  So when the site started to gain popularity the raw amount of data involved started to bring various features of the site to their knees.   This was entirely expected since that was inadvertently how I had coded it while trying to get it done.

The side effect of course is that even though the site has been up and working for months, for the last week or two it was useless at showing you the details about a link, or in fact at directing you to where that link goes.  You know, the whole purpose of the site really.  The reason it turns out was that an extremely crafty SQL query (if I say so myself) ended up being a bit too darn crafty to finish in a reasonable amount of time once there was a lot of data in the database.  In this case, “reasonable” means something a bit like the query would “ever finish.”  While I suspect the query would in fact finish someday, it wasn’t showing any obvious signs of doing anything besides making the CPU in my server nice and warm.

That being the case, I was left to either shut down the site for killing my server, or come up with a better way of doing things.  In this case, multiple very high speed queries.  These queries were designed to be parts of a whole picture that very rarely must all be executed.  So some crafty logic to decide which parts need to happen and executing as few as one of the queries (which is actually the most common case) and the peek and link following code are now back to basically instant.  I’m a big fan of when an attempt to speed things up actually speeds things up.

Now that a decent set of features are up and running, I feel now is a good time to ask everyone what they think.  I welcome general feedback, both positive and negative (be gentle, but accurate please), bug reports, ideas for fun new features that you think would be awesome, etc.  If you like the site, hate the site, want to see the site become better with cool new features or fewer bugs, please email webmaster@wynd.me with anything you want to say.

At the same time as I request feedback, I also welcome everyone to tell a friend about this site.  If you like it and want others to use it too, the only way for that to work is to tell everyone you know about it.  Sure, it’s a shameless request for word-of-mouth advertising, but I would love to see this site become popular, can you blame me?

Thanks to everyone in advance for both the excellent feedback I’m sure I’ll receive and for telling others about this site.

After an absurdly long stretch of downtime, the URL shortener is finally back up and operating.  It took a long time, not due to the complexity of the problem, but rather due to being otherwise engaged.  I’ve returned to college, I’m enjoying married life, I have a full time job unrelated to this site, etc.  I admit there are plenty of features I would still like to get up and running and as always there are a few things that will need repair or enhancement to make me truly happy with the site, but I won’t let those things dampen my spirits about a return to service.

The links I like to refer to as “legacy” links, or more accurately, the ones that were produced on a previous edition of the database that sits behind the website are not super likely to be brought forward at this time.  Also, if they do get migrated forward, they absolutely will not have any statistic data attached to them.  That part just isn’t even possible since there is no information to base it on in the legacy database.  Enjoy the new version of the site, hopefully this time for more than two days.