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