--short URLs done right.
Information for developers
urlBorg is a project in beta. However, it's pretty stable and was designed to take advantage of the scalability Google AppEngine has to offer.
This may not be proper documentation, but if you are a developer or site owner you will probably find valuable information regarding some interesting features of urlBorg.
Follow the my blog for news and ideas, or join our group on Google Groups.
APIs
web interface
If you want a simple way for your web app (or browser applet) to create shortcuts using urlBorg, you may try, linking to
http://urlborg.com/a/?url=...that will pre-fill the target URL in the form.
a rich API (JSON,XML,etc)
Even though urlBorg has a web interface, what I'm really interested in is to provide a service for other applications.
This is why there is a rich API that allows developers to do much much more than they would expect from a "url shortening" service.
If you are a developer, make sure you have a look at the API documentation!
shortcut creation
The idea is simple, you enter a long URL and you get a short one that redirects to the target URL.
If you are interested in urlBorg, there are some things you should keep in mind:
- urlBorg is developed on Google AppEngine. A lot of care has been taken to to take advantage of AppEngine and allow it to scale beyond the limits other similar services have. It should be able to handle "unlimited" traffic!
- urlBorg shortcuts ARE case sensitive! (this is a major change in v2.0)
- Each time you create a short URL, you get a new one, even if the target URL was entered before. (major change since v2.0)
redirects
Redirects are done using "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” header. This means that your site gets each link's google juice instead of urlBorg (and we think it's the right thing to do).
server logs visibility
This doesn;t work at the moment due to a limitation by Google AppEngine
When a new short URL is created the urlBorg bot tries to get more information about it, like content-type and size.
The request will be visible if you examine your weblogs, where the "user agent" is set to urlBorg/2.0 (+http://urlborg.com/)
We think that site owners should be aware of links created by urlBorg and this is only the first step in this direction. Expect to see more.