Li(ttle)URL.cn

Well, its the weekend, and its a beautiful day in Shanghai, so what am I doing?

Writing more blog posts! Its a hard life

As the Grass Mud Horse Phenomenon has apparently peaked, the internet has moved onto other things.

Taiwanese musician 萧闳仁 has released a new CD imaginatively called 法可这个人, which is available for a moderate price on Taobao.
This seller has one for 5RMB in Shanghai.

Watch the video below for another way to get past the river crabs (河蟹), er harmonizers.
If you are a non Chinese literate reader, then listen to the song all the way through in order to get the message.

For the impatient, scroll through to about 2:30 for the main verse.

If the video below isn’t playing for you, try the link to YouKu here instead - 萧闳仁 － 法可这个人

admin Tao Bao gift ideas, taobao, 河蟹, 法可U, 萧闳仁

While I’m aware that its usually a little skeezy promoting your own stuff, this is actually quite a cool product that we designed in-house.

iWantOne.cn has some cool Fridge Magnet sets for those wanting to learn Chinese (or English).

The first set is available now, and includes phrases useful for talking to your ayi.

The idea came about from a client – who asked why we didn’t put some English translation on our Shanghainese or Mandarin badges.
(Yes, we do have a Grass Mud Horse badge, for those that read the New York Times).

I thought about it for a while, and remembered the fridge poetry craze from a few years ago, and had the seminal idea to make a magnet set with Chinese, English and Pinyin translations.

A month or three and many prototypes later, we finally had a product.

That my i could also finally tell the Ayi to clean under the sofa was also a bonus!

Link here: http://liurl.cn/eu

Disclaimer – Our parent company owns iWantOne. and FridgeLingo.

admin Shopping, Site Related ayi, cool hunting, fridge magnets, fridgelingo, iwantone, shanghainese

As I’m keen to see more use of LiURL.cn, I do keep an eye on logs to see who’s linking to us.

Johan Sundström over at userscripts.org has written a php short url services expansion script which includes LiURL.cn.

The script is here:
http://userscripts.org/scripts/review/46822

http://longurl.org has also added support for expanding url’s. Thanks Sean!

Also, a warm thanks/谢谢 to all our users out there also in twitterland.

We also have a twitter id for those that want to follow us for the occasional tweet. – http://www.twitter.com/liurl

admin API, Sightings (LiURL.cn in the wild) 3rd party, php, script, twitter

SmartShanghai.com is now using LiURL.cn to generate small url’s for all their twitter links.

Its not immediately obvious, but if you click on the Twitter link (example below), you’ll see LiURL in use.

We worked with SmartShanghai in order to assist them with integration. SmartShanghai’s original plan was to run a script to generate url’s for all 5000+ venues. While this would have worked, it wasn’t an optimal solution for either site.

Our revised design works something like this.

On page load, SmartShanghai checks to see if they have a small url for the page in their database.
If they don’t, they call LiURL’s API (http://liurl.cn/api-create.php?url=[YOURURL]) to generate a Little URL, and save the URL locally in their database.

Simple, and elegant. URL’s are generated only once, on a page request by a user.

If you would like to use LiURL.cn in your site, let us know, and we can assist with integration.

For the technically inclined, sample PHP code to use LiURL.cn is below.

admin API, Site Related API, franck, integration, smartshanghai, twitter

Hovering over in the I don’t need it, but I want one category we have this piece of awesomeness:

Its almost creeping into the “its so wrong that its right” category, but I’ll forgive its rambunctiousness.
Woah, I’m starting to sound like Woot! here.

Read more…

admin Shopping, Tao Bao cool hunting, fast food diary, gift ideas, taobao

Some of the fun uses of LiURL are for linking sites with enormously long URL’s – TaoBao, yes I’m looking at you there.

Here are a couple of things I found this morning that I linked to with our URL Shortening tool that make great birthday gifts.

I’ve always liked the idea of giving someone something that shows a little thought in the present.  So, I present to you – newspapers from whenever; when framed they make great gifts.

Only problem is finding out exactly how old someone is in order to order, not everyone wants to tell their true age!

一大使用LiURL的乐趣是从网站上连接一些特别长的链接-淘宝，是的，我正从那浏览呢。

这里是一些我早上发现的，通过我们链接缩短工具连接的，可以作为美妙的生日礼物的东东。

我一直喜欢赠送给朋友们一些可以引人思考的礼物。所以我在此介绍给你-各式的重新装裱后的旧报纸，它们是作为生日礼物的绝佳选择。

唯一的问题是找出想要订购他们的人的年龄，因为并不是每个人都乐于透露自己的真实年纪呢！

http://liurl.cn/75

http://liurl.cn/76

Lots of newspaper choices -

丰富种类的报刊选择-

新华日报 (Xin Hua)
南方日报 (Southern)
etc

The image below shows how cool something can look framed.

以下的图片展示了美妙的装裱后的报刊。

admin Shopping, Tao Bao

We actually have an API for the LiURL site, although I haven’t really documented it that well as of yet.  As we’re a brand new site, we’re busy building in functionality, so this will get expanded in further posts as we add features.

To get a Shortened URL (aka Little URL) , the call is this:

http://liurl.cn/api-create.php?url=

Which returns the short URL. If you’ve been naughty and haven’t passed a valid URL, then it will return you a big fat -1 for your efforts.

Strangely enough, we also have the diametrically opposite call of that, which (suprise suprise)  gives you a long URL from a shortened one

http://liurl.cn/api-create.php?tinyurl=

This also returns a -1 failure if the URL isn’t one we know about.

Some sample PHP code after the break

虽然我目前仍未正式书面记录，不过在LiURL网站 我们已经使用了API。由于我们是新建的品牌网站，目前我们正忙于建设网站的功能性。所以这部分我们将在以后增加网站新特性时候加以扩充。

如果需要缩短后的链接 如下所示

http://liurl.cn/api-create.php?url=

它将返回缩短后的链接。如果您没有通过正规的链接那么将会出现大大的 -1错误提示。

奇怪的是，我们也遇到了完全相反的情况，有时它会从短链接提供一个长链接（非常奇怪）。

http://liurl.cn/api-create.php?tinyurl=

如果链接不正确 它同样也会出现 -1 错误提示。

以下是一些错误后的PHP编码样本。

Read more…

admin API API, php, script, 短连接

As we’ve had Google analytics running on the LiURL site since its launch, its been interesting for me to see where the site is actually being used.
So far usage has spread to a bunch of cities I’ve never even heard of in China, as well as the usual culprits (Shanghai, Beijing).  Lets hope that we can spread to more cities next month, and cover the map!

Interestingly enough, zero hits from outside China so far.

网站使用统计

在LiURL网站开启的时候 我们就启用了谷歌分析系统。观察网站在被如何使用对我来说是十分有趣的。
目前为止，网站被大量的中国城市使用，如文化中心（上海，北京）甚至更有些我从未听说过的中国城市。希望我们在下个月能将网站推广到更多的城市中去，覆盖整个地图！

非常有趣的是，目前没有中国以外的使用记录。

City Usage Map

Chinese City's LiURL is being used from!

admin Site Related Stats

Welcome to the Li(ttle)URL.cn blog.

We’re just setting things up, but will be posting cool sites us and our users have found, as well as updates on whats happening at LiURL.cn
Stay tuned!

欢迎来到 LiURL.CN 博客

我们刚刚架设完博客，不过我们将会放上我们和我们用户们找到的优秀网站，同时也会保持更新LiURL.cn上发生的日常事务。
请保持关注！

admin Uncategorized