::The Chilp blog::

Joyeux Noël – Frohe Weihnachten – Merry Christmas!

:-)

Since Twitter is just too slow fixing their bugs we rewrote our software and removed the “?” from the links. Links with “?” will still work but fresh ones will come without it. Please let us know if you stumble upon something odd. Cheers. :-)

Oh, and thanks for nothing Twitter.

A few users might encounter random connectivity issues since our network provider recently “lost” one of his upstream providers. Well, good luck with the search…

Update: Anyway, NOC is rerouting traffic and it should be all good pretty soon.

Update II: Oh, those folks lost not one but two upstream providers. Bad luck. But, service seems to be restored.

Since a few hours, Twitter is breaking links shortened with Chilp.it on user pages. As a result, users aren’t able to click that particular link anymore. The link itself is perfectly alright and valid, Twitter just breaks it for some unknown reason.

This is how it looks like right now on user pages:

It is all good through the search, though:

We opened a ticket but didn’t receive any response from Twitter so far.
Sorry for the inconvenience, those folks will hopefully fix this asap.

Thanks a lot.

Update: 24 hours later, still no response. We aren’t too happy with the way Twitter handles those things.

Update II: Other users who are not using Chilp.it are reporting broken links too. Check out http://twitter.com/travel_tour.

Update III: Finally, Twitter is aware of the bug. Check the Twitter Development Talk.

Update IV: Seven days later the problem still exists. We are as unhappy as you are.

Update V: Please look here!

Great!

The Prodigy used a link shortened with Chilp.it on their main site to promote a free Mp3 track from the 2009 Special Edition of their latest album “Invaders must die”.

We like that!

If you want to know how often the track has been downloaded you might just take a look here:

http://s.chilp.it/38e3d1

:-)

We just had an unplanned and very spontaneous 7 minute (21.00-21.07 GMT+1) downtime. All systems are up and running again and we are looking into it.

Cheers.

[Update: We had some issues with the network connectivity which are fixed now.]

Did you know?

There is an easy way to directly shorten URLs out of Google Reader.
Just manually add Chilp.it and it will show up in the “Send to:” menu at the bottom of each item.

How? Well, try this:

1. Open Google Reader and click the settings page:

2. Select the “Send To” menu:

3. Click “Create a custom link” at the bottom of the page and add the Chilp.it settings:

Download settings here (.txt)

Done. You can now directly send items you like to share with others to Chilp.it for easy shortening. Just select “Send to” & “Chilp.it” at the bottom of an item in Google Reader and the URL will be directly processed. Easy, huh?

If you have any questions just drop us a line and we’ll get back to you.

Twitter is not showing any question marks in Twitter Search anymore which made our Chilp.it links break if accessed via the search.

Take a look here: http://twitter.com/Chilp/status/3145914555 (with question mark)

In the search: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=fdsfetgfdfasfgfdgeggaeg (without question mark)

We opened a ticket regarding this issue and also updated Chilp.it to work without question marks too to make all broken links work again after all.
This update has been deployed very quickly and everything seems to work fine despite Twitter’s inability to display question marks via their search interface.

Twitter will hopefully fix this soon.

[Update: Twitter fixed this issue and closed our open ticket without further explanation.]

[Update II: Twitter only fixed it half since posts are able to contain “?” again but old ones are still broken. We reopened the ticket.]

[Update III: Twitter closed the ticket without a corresponding comment. We reopened it again since the problem is still there.]

[Update IV: Twitter “solved” the problem by deleting the post from the search index. Sigh. http://search.twitter.com/search?q=fdsfetgfdfasfgfdgeggaeg]

I give up.

Our site may be slower than it should be due to routing issues at the DE-CIX (German Commercial Internet Exchange).
Our provider is aware of this and is taking action.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

[Update: All problems solved.]

Dear folks,

just to let you know,
everything is all good, the systems are up and running and we are even working on some exciting stuff.
The coffee is hot and so very tasty. :-)

Anyhow, our traffic is still doubling every month and we are quite happy to announce a lot more is coming from Iran these days. We even had our first click from South Korea and Saudi Arabia and we are very excited about that.

Still percentage-wise most of the clicks do come from the States even though Brazil and Germany are trying to catch up. Since Chilp is a german based company it’s no wonder Germany is quite high up in this list. We also have a lot of fans in Brazil which makes us proud too.

And yes, it’s fantastic to see China in the Top 5 click list:

1. United States
2. Germany
3. Brazil
4. China
5. Belgium

Happy clicking and thanks a lot for your support!

If you have a question just drop us a line and we’ll get in contact with you.
Have a fine day.

Cheers,
Zalt