xit.co.za

xit.co.za FAQ

• Why another URL shortner?

I wanted to keep my development skills sharp, and needed a pet project to work on in between all the other work I have, and a URL shortening service seemed like a fun thing to do.

• Why is the shortening form not accepting my URL?

The URLs can be only http:// or https:// URLs, any other protocols are denied.

If you omit the http:// the system will add it in for you though.

• What is xit.co.za written in?

I use Zend Framework for all the backend, and MySQL 5.0 for the database.

• Will you make the code available under an open-source license?

Ai, tough question. I'd like to, but not quite yet.

• How long did it take to write?

Ignoring all the time I spent trying to get the forms on the site to render nicely, I'd say about 10 hours or so, for most of the base code and database design and putting everything together

I spent a fair amount of time deciding what template/look-and-feel to use and coding and re-coding some of the parts of the site, such as the auto-generating of unique-id bits, making sure user-chosen unique ids don't break the auto-generated ones, etc.

• What next?

Oh I have tons of ideas for the site, and will implement as and when I have time. Some bigger twitter integration with their new OAuth stuff is something that I'd like to play with, but that'll be later. I want to add mechanisms to edit URLs and allow people to get stats on their URLs etc. still too, so a login form and 'My Account' type thing will end up making it here too.

• Why such a short FAQ?

Nobody loves me, nobody asks questions. :-)

• What terms and conditions are there?

Well, the service is free to use as you please, but the urls and the shortened urls and any information entered onto this website remains the ownership of the xit.co.za team, and we can do with it as we please.

And we reserve the right to refuse service to anybody, and modify redirected-to urls for any reason whatsoever, including, but not limited to, fixing urls that seem to contain errors.

The service is also available on a best effort basis, any reliance you put on this service for any reason whatsoever is done at your own risk and you cannot blame us if our hosting provider or our server or our coding causes the service to become unavailable for any amount of time. Want reliability? Contact us and we can install a custom installation of the site on your server on your own domain.

The xit.co.za team also reserves the right to force a preview page of a link instead of automatically redirecting, for any reason whatsoever.