I’m re-announcing http://ewerl.com here with some new features added. I put together a couple screen shots of the functionality over at the website’s “about” page, but I’ll outline the highlights here:
1. User accounts – a lot of people wanted to be able to log in and keep track of their Ewerls. This is done.
2. Stats tracking – the previous version had this, and it’s been split in to two levels, a free and a paid-for version. The free version is probably fine for most people – it’ll show you the number of times your Ewerl has been used. The pay version ($9.95 per year with a 3 day free trial) will show you time/date usage, IP, user agent, referring URLs, and a city/state/location when possible.
3. WordPress plugin – You can now have your WordPress posts convert your links to Ewerls automatically.
Upcoming features:
1. RSS – planning to bring back some level of RSS functionality again. Moving to this v2 meant I had to put RSS on the back burner for now. Let me know if you want it.
2. Email – daily email usage reports. I’d started this on v1, but had to shelve it to get the rest of this out.
3. Backwards compatibility for the previous API calls. There weren’t too many people using them yet, so this was something else that fell lower in priority. If you want/need that back, let me know.
Go try it out and let me know what you think!
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Help test a new URL shortening / redirection service
What? Another URL redirection service? What’s the point? Well, there’s a couple of points.
1) I hadn’t done one yet, and it looked like a simple yet difficult enough challenge to get me thinking about coding again.
2) I didn’t see anything that offered usage statistics. I tried one that claimed to offer them, but it appeared broken. I’m pretty sure I’ve heard of some others that do, but I couldn’t find them.
So, today I put up http://ewerl.com. It’s a play on the word “ewe” pronounced as “you”, as in “YOU R L” (URL). Yeah, I probably shouldn’t have to explain it, but the picture of cartoon sheep should help drive the point home. Otherwise one might read it as “e-whirl”. Not what I was going after 
I asked for some feedback on Twitter and already saw someone poking XSS holes in the supplied data. Completely my fault, as I wasn’t cleaning the data for security (see, needing to get my head back in the game, so to speak). I’m using the PHP PDO library, and binding data with prepared statements, so I’m not *as* worried about SQL injection, but the XSS was a bit of an eye opener (thanks, whoever you were). That’s plugged temporarily while I come up with a better long term solution. It’s *workable* now, but I want to see if there’s a better approach than what I took.
On the stats end, any URL you shorten with the service has stats publicly viewable by adding “/stats” at the end of the URL. If you’d prefer to get them in RSS form, add “/rss” instead of “/stats”. The ewerl.com/faq/ page has a link to an example stats page and that has a link to the RSS feed.
If there’s any features you’d like to see in a service like this, please comment here or drop me an email. Please test it out, bang on it, poke holes in it, and send me any feedback (good or bad) that you have.
Thanks!
I'm currently working on a book for web freelancers, covering everything you need to know to get started or just get better. Want to stay updated? Sign up for my mailing list to get updates when the book is ready to be released!
