JJJJJ.us URL Shortener

About

The JJJJJ.us URL Shortener was something I started thinking about when tr.im abruptly announced it would close it's doors in August of 2009. Although I wasn't as dramatically or personally affected as some of my peers were at the time, the idea of my hyperlinks suddenly linking to nowhere because a company had shut down or simply stopped supporting them didn't settle very well with me.

Using the spare time I had on the train on my way to and from work, I started developing a simple little CGI from scratch that would shrink and expand url's on one of my personal servers. Since the first few scribblings of notes, it has expanded in scope and complexity into a url-shortening, link-previewing, content-archiving, screen-shooting system involving serveral servers - and there are still a large number of notes in my source code of things to be done. I guess it's true that no project is ever finished.

Not content with tweaking this thing to death, I finally decided to bite the bullet and put it online in it's fully-functional and fairly-ugly form. As I see it, most users will just be clicking redirect links and rarely visiting the jjjjj.us site directly, so I didn't have much motivation to make it pretty.

This is a private service running on a private server. At this time, I have no plans to open this service to the public.

Any questions or comments can be sent via email to j@jjjjj.us or track me down on Twitter