Well, you may have noticed our absence over the past few weeks. We started out busy with internal projects, then got more swamped than usual with customer work (no complaints!). Today I got the chance to wrap up one of our internal projects: ByZe.us.
ByZe.us once started as an internal link shortener with not much in the way of functionality. Then we added some minimal tracking capabilities, and then, over time, other people started using it. Over time we decided to scrap it entirely and start over. Since we promised we’d never chuck any shortened URLs (some sites clear out a short URL after only a month!), we had to be very careful that any existing data could be ported over to the new system.
Success!
As of today, ByZe.us now offers all the original functionality in a much improved package, as well as tons of additional functionality. For the folks shortening URLs, you now get a more robust preview screen that includes the title, description, and your keywords. This information is all sucked over automatically, assuming you’ve given us a URL to a well formatted page. You do have a title tag and some meta data, don’t you?
You’ve also got some more robust tracking too. You can see how many folks clicked the link and from where – and when we say “from where,” we mean not just where on the web, but where in the world too!
For those visiting the shortened links, know that we now check a couple blacklists to make sure the links being shortened aren’t up to no good. Furthermore, many URL shortening services will shorten already shortened URLs, making fishy sites even more obscure and harder to detect until it is too late. We don’t allow URLs that are redirected to be shortened, unless they redirect to the same domain, since there are some justifiable reasons to redirect.
By no means do you need to create an account or log in (we use Twitter’s oAuth for accounts, by the way), but if you do, we’ve save some preferences including which social networks to show for sharing by default, if you want to always see the preview page before being sent to the link, as well as access to the tracking info for links you created while signed in. For those who don’t sign in, we still do the best we can, but you are more likely to lose your saved preferences (i.e. if you clear your cookies).
So there you have it, the revamped ByZe.us, our latest offering. Check it out today!
