If your dns is slow to update, you can use new.bluga.net.

Last week we launched our API which lets you integrate shorten and post functionality into any site or application. Today we are adding the ability to use your own domain for shortening. This lets you have urls like http://joshuaeichorn.com/9OPL so your readers can know what domain they are going too before they click on the link.

Now down to the fun part installation.

Step 1, Sign up for Su.pr

Just go to the su.pr homepage and sign up using suprjosh for the invite code (The code is good for 500 sign ups).

Step 2, install and configure the PHP re-director

I’m not going go over this in detail since instructions are already available from su.pr.

Note: when installing the rewrite rule you’ll want to make sure its not catching any of your other pages, I put mine after all my custom rules and added a condition to check the given url wasn’t the name of a file or directory.

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^[a-zA-Z0-9]{4}$ supr.php?supr=$0
RewriteRule ^supr_settings.json$ supr.php?check_install=$0

If your doing your URL rewriting in PHP you might want to handle the link detection there instead, but 4 character words with no extension aren’t too common.

Step 3, Test is out

Now that you are up and running any short url created on Su.pr for your domain will be use your domain instead of su.pr for the shortening. If you ran into any problems let me know, I will see what I can do to help.

Details on how things work

• The settings on your server tell Su.pr if it has a redirector
• If the redirector is enable all new Su.pr urls for the matching domain are made with your domain
• Requests go to your server and are picked up by the rewrite rule
• The redirector on your server makes a call to the Su.pr API which returns a domain redirection url, something like http://su.pr/d/joshuaeichorn.com/abcd
• The user is redirected back to su.pr and then forwarded to the correct page on your server

The double redirection at the end lets us collect stats and do the required setup for showing the Javascript version of the Stumbleupon toolbar.

So far the biggest issue has been getting access in PHP, we use thrift for that but the raw API leaves a lot to be desired. Luckily it wasn’t too big of a job to wrap things. Now I get joys of schema-less tables, atomic counters, great performance, and reliability. Now i just need to figure out how to get a small cluster for my own projects in a cost effective way.

However there was a bit of database skew between the 2 servers so some accounts weren’t available on the backup.
Because of this all webthumb usage on the backup server won’t be charge to your accounts. It also won’t show up in your history so if you need a thumbnail after the cut back please open a ticket and I will grab the files for you.

(You can also grab them directly by replacing http://webthumb.bluga.net with http://api1.bluga.net).

The DNS switch back to the primary server is happening within the hour, let me know if you have any problems.

On an un-related note Bluga.net now has a helpdesk, feel free to use it too notify me of any problems your having.

The PHP apiwrapper has been updated, there have been some API updates but nothing recently. One important item is that is uses version switching in the request to improve error handling.

You can grab it from svn or from the download page.

Since webthumb is now running on 2 physical servers pricing, I’m spending less on Amazon aws services this has allowed me to reduce prices. For volume purchases you can get credits at $1.25 per 1000.

More news and a we’re sorry gift of credits will be coming soon.

The 2nd backup server/thumbnail processor is still waiting on some heat sinks before it can get installed but now were running on a server with next day dell support.

I’ll have more details on webthumb changes once the dns has been updated. But the biggest difference will be a full time backup API which will be available all the time and support transparent fail over.

The pear wiki, and phpdoc.org should be back as well.

On that note contact me if you are interested in bulk purchases of credits. For purchases of 250k credits or more the rate is $1.25 per 1000. If you will be using more then 250k credits a month additional discounts are available, depending on your usage patterns.

This will fix problems with bad urls in multi-request submissions. Let me know if you have any concerns.