Alternatives to Bitly

Since Goo.gl shut down back in March 2019, there have not been many other options for shortening URLs. Bitly and Rebrandly are the top companies in the link shortening space but I believe they are too expensive and more complicated than what most people need.

Over the past couple of months, I have been working on a new shortener service T.LY. T.LY offers generous plans with the ability to track stats, protect links with a password and expire links from a number of clicks and/or dates. The API is simple to use and would be a great addition to any application needing to shorten long URLs. There is also an extension for Chrome Firefox, which makes shortening links a breeze.

As I have been working on the service, I have been posting updates to IndieHackers. If you have any questions, please leave a comment below.

Rapid Ring App

I’ve been using the Ring Doorbell Pro for the past couple of years. It has been a great camera/doorbell with very few issues. Ring recently released a new app for iOS and Android that allows quick access to view the camera. It is called Rapid Ring. The original Ring app is great for video playback and changing settings but at times it is so slow the person ringing your door may have already left. Rapid Ring quickly loads the video feed of any Ring device. If you are experiencing slowness with the current Ring app, I recommend trying Rapid Ring App.

Handle Long URL Redirects NGINX

Over the past couple of weeks, I have been working on a URL Shortener Service. When testing the ability to shorten really long urls (over 3500+ characters) I ran into an issue I had never seen before. When trying to redirect to the long url, NGINX would return a 502 error (upstream sent too big header while reading response header from upstream). After some research, I discovered the long url is sent in the header of the response. To fix this issue, I had to change the fastcgi_buffers and fastcgi_buffer_size setting in the location section of NGNIX. Read More

Introducing T.LY

Over the past several months, I have been working on a Link Shortener Extension for (Chrome|Firefox|Edge|Opera)which has grown to over 400,000 users! The feedback has been great and many users love how simple it is to shorten long links. The extension allows users to select their default shortener services such as T.LY, TinyUrl, Bit.ly, is.gd, To.ly, Cutt.ly, Brevis, Rebrandly, and Lnnkin. In one click, they can shorten a URL which is then automatically copied to their clipboard in less than a second.

Since the creation of the extension, the goal has been to give users an alternative to goo.gl which shut down in March 2019. This has worked well but shortener services come and go. So to make the extension more stable, I needed to create my own URL shortener. Read More