Li(ttle)URL.cn » Site Related

Cool Stuff | Fridgelingo Chinese Fridge Magnets

admin — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 04:18:40 +0000

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.

SmartShanghai.com now using LiURL

admin — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 23:38:17 +0000

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.

//Use cUrl to retrieve content
function get_content($url) {
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
ob_start();
curl_exec ($ch);
curl_close ($ch);
$string = ob_get_contents();
ob_end_clean();
return $string;
}

//URL = url to encode
$url="http://www.example.com";

//Call the LiURL api
$content = get_content ("http://liurl.cn/api-create.php?url=". $url);

//Show our short url
echo $content;

Site usage Statistics

admin — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 10:14:31 +0000

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!