I CAN HAZ dot COM has been popular since day one. Who’d have thought a short URL service (with cats) could be so much fun, not to mention a great playground for trying stuff out.
We were the first URL shortener to *not* create random strings for short URLS, instead allowing the user to create something memorable. This is good for a lot of reasons, something I’ll cover in another post.
They look like this http://icanhaz.com/josh instead of this http://tinyurl.com/yvarg9 (both resolve to my blog).
We’ve had 30,000 URLS created, and together they’ve been clicked on nearly 2,000,000 times.
So because things have been going great, and you’ve been poking us on every social network there is about features you’d like to see, we spent some time adding the most useful stuff…
User Accounts
Now you can save your URLS on your account. This lets you get some stats and edit the redirect in the future.
An API (vers.0.1)
Dave built the API to compliment the user accounts, for now it’s limited but does the core things you’ll need, here’s the docs. The simplest thing this lets us do is to allow third party apps to let their users create URLs on I CAN HAZ dot COM in their user accounts. This is obviously a good thing!
(app developers: If you’re building an app that allows people to create short URLs using I CAN HAZ dot COM, you can let users give you their API key rather than their passwords.. help us keep our users secure by not encouraging them to share their login details!)
A Shorter URL
We registered a shorter URL, icnhz.com, which can be used in place of icanhaz.com in any url you’ve created. And of course used as the URL in URLs created using the API.
Fan Wiki
We also started a fan wiki, which I guess I’m announcing here :) If you’ve done something with the API, or just something cool with I CAN HAZ dot COM, feel free to add it there. Remy has done a great bookmarklet, I’m sure it’ll be up there soon!
Reliability..
.. is something we need to work on. This is already being highlighted as an issue for all URL shortening services, and is something we’d like do make sure doesn’t become an issue for us. Essentially, if we’re down for any reason then all the URLs that redirect through us won’t work, or resolve anywhere. There is a *lot* of discussion about how to limit this as an issue, but something we can do right away is make our platform more robust, and move onto better servers.
Sponsorship
To help us get to a more robust state we’re going to start displaying sponsors on the homepage. This will be for a limited period, and a one-time-only opportunity! We’d love to promote other small projects and startups rather than anything else. If you’d like to get involved and become a sponsor, send me your name and email address in the form below and I’ll get back to you (rss readers, click here). We’ll be using Pistach.io to do this, keeping it all in the family :)
(there’s a couple of easter eggs too, see if you can find them!)