::The Chilp blog::

Joyeux Noël – Frohe Weihnachten – Merry Christmas!

:-)

Chilp.it is currently experiencing a rather long downtime, our provider is actively looking into it. There seems to be a serious network problem.
Sorry for the inconvenience.

Update: The service is back again, we’re still waiting for a good explanation.
Update II: One of the main servers was suffering from a severe mainboard failure and needed to be replaced. Fair enough.

It’s all good now.

Just to let you know: Our happy servers will physically move to a new and fresh datacenter tonight. There will be a scheduled downtime of the Chilp it! service between 23:30 and 8:00 o’clock (GMT+1).
We are very sorry for the inconvenience!

Well, why not just sit tight and hang in there? We’ll do pretty much the same… :-)

Cheers,
Zalt

Update: All services are up and running again (2010-11-06, 08:52).

We are aware of a rather massive attack against our happy service and are taking all necessary steps. We are also blocking all corresponding URLs. Thanks a lot for the reports we received so far.

Stay tuned.

Random fact: Since we are still providing a relatively open API we also need to fight a lot of spam. Even if we believe in the idea of openness it is sometimes not fully practical.

We decided to keep the open API for as long as we can but to also keep an eye on what’s going on. And, there’s a lot going on, in fact, there’s so much going on that we decided we have to put a spam and misuse detection in place that relies both on Google’s Safebrowsing API and our own detection routines. The filters are constantly learning and are getting better and better. The truth is: Blocking domains has never been our intention but we pretty much have no choice anymore.

Anyway, we are rather pleased with the results and hope you’re too.

If your site is blocked and you feel that it shouldn’t just drop us a line and we take a look. On the other hand: If you want to report spam or misuse please contact us via the abuse address or via Twitter.

Have a fine day. :-)

OpenDNS recently tagged our happy shortener as a phishing site within their service which caused a lot of trouble for us. Even though they were not directly reachable for further comments we managed to get hold of them very quickly via Twitter.

@OpenDaniel responded extremely fast and resolved the issue. Thanks again, OpenDNS, for sorting that out.

Keep up the good work!

Great news, people!

Tweetdeck recently added support for custom url shorteners. What does that mean? Well, you can use our happy service now within Tweetdeck too.

How? Take a look at the explanation.

Just put in “http://chilp.it/api.php?url=%@” and start using Chilp.it with Tweetdeck now.

Have fun. :-)

Good news:

Starting from today, we’ll check every shortened URL against Google’s constantly updated blacklists of suspected phishing and malware pages.

What does this mean? Well, check it out…

…here are some of the things we can do with the Safe Browsing API:

• Warn users before clicking on links that lead to malware-infested pages.
• Check pages against Google’s lists of suspected phishing and malware pages.

Hu? Try me! http://chilp.it/malware