::The Chilp blog::

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

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.