Baking Soda, Baking Powder

It's all in the details.... sometimes you spend so much time on the details and wonder if that's what you should be working on. But we're crazy that way. Not sure exactly why it took us so long, but there you go, we fixed the url-checking when a visitor enters a URL to redirect to.

You see, when we added the "cloud" of recently created tiny url links we noticed that a few of them were going to weird urls like: http://. or http://asdfasdf/ which are obviously cats typing by walking on the keyboard of users with no password protected screensaver enabled. So, with apologies to all those typing cats, we've implemented a basic url checking feature. Now, if we've been too strict, let us know what url you are wanting to redirect to. Oh, and you can't redirect to .exe files for obvious reasons....

Keep on baking and keep on sending in your feedback!

Thx!

Custom Tag

Small update, but it'll save you a few keystrokes. And isn't that what this is all about?

Now when you are inputting a Custom Tag, you can just type in words with spaces, and we'll automatically insert hypens.

So: gde ti remix becomes: www.xr.com/gde-ti-remix

(Hope you like russian pop -- and don't confuse this one with the number one russian hit that I heard last month in the Ukraine: www.xr.com/gde-ti )

Enjoy!

To Do List....

What better place to put the "To Do" list than right here on the blog. That's really 'putting it out there' so to speak. A lot of this comes from reading a few articles that have reviewed many of the url shortening services out there. Many of these services have great features, most have terrible (read long) domain names, but everyone seems to be missing something. So, while we can't be everything to everyone, since we are the shortest .com url shortening service out here, we are going to try and incorporate all the features a url shortening service should have.

So here goes...... (deep breath)......

Bookmarking - URLs need to be shortened via a toolbar bookmark button

Customization (already done) - but we're going to tweak it so that if you just type in words we'll fill the spaces with hyphens, so "map to my house" becomes xr.com/map-to-my-house

API -- half done and we'll release what we have very soon.

Trust -- you need to be able to use your own domain. Gotcha. We'll tell you how shortly.

Stats - ok, this is the biggie. Voted the feature to stay on the "to do" list the longest.

Preview -- you need to be able to just add "preview" in front of the xr.com link so that you can see the destination URL as well as static screenshot of the destination website.

Short URL -- well, we win for having the shortest .com domain being used for a url shortening service, but we have seen two letter domains combined with two letter country codes so they beat us by a character. Not to be defeated, we're shopping for a 1 letter domain to combine with a two letter country code. Can't really get much shorter than that, and we've not seen it done by any url shortening service yet.

Top-Frame on/off - we think the top frame is useful, but let's give you the ability to turn it on and off.

Private Label - after we let you use your own domain, would you like to have a private labelled top frame? We think so.

Earn Cash -- optional, but why don't we figure out a way for us all to earn some money?

Anything else? email us at info at xr.com and we'll add it to the list!

Custom Tag

It's one thing to shorten your url to be as short as possible, but it's also pretty cool to be able to make your short link relevant to the visitor.

You could send a link out to your friends with a generic: http://xr.com/gp8 or you could send them a more descriptive link: http://xr.com/lame-costumes

It's simple -- when you are at www.xr.com and you've pasted in the url that you want to shorten, if you click "shorten your url" then we'll give you an ultra short url. However, if you put in a custom tag in the "customize" box, then we'll create your own custom xr.com link.

Small bragging point -- we had this before tinyurl.com did. Small humble point -- we weren't the first.

Well, it's about time....

XR.com has been around forever, but we have been very quietly existing. Occassionally a user tracks us down and tells us of a feature they'd like implemented.

So, here we are. With a laundry list of ideas and a bit of time on our hands....

First up, is a "cloud" of sorts to show links that other users have created. It's especially interesting to see the custom ones that people create. Like http://xr.com/india-traffic that shows the insect-like characteristics of traffic in India versus the "I am immortal" attitude in Russia at http://xr.com/russia-traffic or the more somber http://xr.com/dead honoring the ultimate sacrifice being made today.

I have noticed that people like to shorten the login pages of sites they visit a lot. Like http://xr.com/hsc for the MMORPG login page for the Fallen Sword game, or the (still in beta) login to Fastmail.fm's newest version that has been a year in the making at http://xr.com/fast

Personally, I use xr.com the most for shortening the links to google maps. I mean, c'mon google, is this really managable: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&saddr=701+First+Ave,+Sunnyvale,+CA+94089+(Yahoo+Inc.)&daddr=Google+HQ+%4037.425381,-122.083679&hl=en&geocode=CeTzRpBNkvfOFVvwOgIdKAm6-CEMKgtdfYpTRQ%3BFeUQOwIdoSa5-A&mra=pe&mrcr=0&sll=37.372451,-122.017275&sspn=0.172162,0.362549&ie=UTF8&z=14 -- even if you don't mind a long descriptive link, wouldn't this be better: http://xr.com/yahoo-to-google

Enough rambling for now... What's next for XR.com? We'll start revealing some of the things that we have working in the background but that we've just not told you about. Like our API, or how you can use your own domain to work with XR.com, or (and some bloggers will love this) how you can run your very own url shortening service where the alias codes are unique to you.

Feel free to comment with your ideas of what we should be adding.

Thx!