::The Chilp blog::

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).

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!

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!

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.]

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 all,

our provider informed us about an important network maintenance happening  on the 28th of May 2009 between 03.00 and 03.30 (GMT+1) which might cause brief interruptions.

These interruptions are indeed supposed to be very short and should not be longer than a few seconds.
Most Chilp it! users will not even notice these upgrades.
Well, if you’re running into timeouts feel free to try again after a few seconds.

We like to apologize in advance for any inconvenience this might cause.

Anyway, keep on shortening and have a fine day.

Cheers,
Zalt

You may have the need to convert regular web addresses into shorter URLs within your docs automatically.
Get ready,  it’s fairly simple to setup and way easier than you think.

Log into Google Docs, create a new document or open an existing one and use the following formula for shortening:

=importData(concatenate(“http://chilp.it/api.php?url=”,A2))

Copy the formula and paste it into the fields you want to use.

You need to change the field “A2” to the corresponding long URL field. After entering the long URL in the chosen field, the magic happens and the formula creates a short URL.

Your done. Easy does it.

:-)

Let us know if you’re having trouble setting this up.