::The Chilp blog::

Just to let you know: We just brought another fresh service online. Yeah!
Welcome to the Chilp Media Group Picture Painting Service http://chilp.me.

Paint a picture, share the short URL and make other people happy.
Easy does it: http://chilp.me/11 :-)

Cheers,
Jessica

Great news: Chilp.it is now available via IPv6.

Host: chilp.it
IP: 2001:41D0:1:5B7d::

Cheers,
Zalt

Dear all,

we’re heavily working on new services and will release an open beta of a fresh product soon. At this point I’m still not allowed to tell what it’s exactly about but I promise you’ll like it. ;-)
Oh, and it has nothing to do with short URLs…

Stay tuned,
Cheers,
Zalt

Chilp.it is currently down due to our provider’s sudden need to terminate all services.

Just to let you know: We are heavily working on bringing the site back to life!
We are very sorry for the inconvenience.

No previously generated short URLs will be harmed or lost!

Update: We ordered fresh and strong servers and will restore services soon. All short URLs will soon redirect to the wished destinations. Stay tuned.

Update II: The servers are in place, we are currently restoring the databases.

Update III: As soon as the databases are restored the DNS will be switched to the new server destinations.

Update IV: DNS has changed to the new IPs, services are slowly restoring. Stats and preview are still down.

Update V: All services are fully restored. Thanks a lot for your patience.

Cheers,
Jessica

Dear all,

good news, we updated our brave spam fighting systems.
From now on every link that someone tries to shorten will not only be checked against our local blacklist and Google’s Safebrowsing API but also against Spamhaus’ DBL.

If that entered URL is in one of those lists the API or the web interface will respond with a new error:
“410 – Krch! Domain is blacklisted!”.
You won’t be able to shorten any links from this domain then.

All links that have been shortened in the past and magically end up on the blacklists will be blocked too.
As a result, the corresponding Chilp.it short URLs will stop working and won’t redirect to the destination anymore.

Happy shortening!

Cheers,
Zalt

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. :-)