Now on cdn: How not to register a dot-kz domain.

The fun really started after YOURLS was installed to handle the shortener system, first question: “where to register bri.kz?”, I went down the list of registrars at KazNIC (nic.kz) trying to find one with English as a language option (Cyrillic is bewildering), I settled on http://www.regtime.net/ (.kz 550 rubels per year roughly $20 in Jan 2010), although their https certificate turned out to be webnames.ru (Firefox mismatch warning good for your sanity).

It turned out, that to pay the registration fee to webnames.ru I needed to use a web currency; I chose WebMoney’s WMZ [USD equivalent], signed up for an account (wmtransfer.com) only to find that I needed another account elsewhere to fund the WMZ purse at WebMoney from my credit card.

Note: this is past midnight, so now early Sunday morning.

Off to savechange.ru, signup, login, fill in WMZ purse number.

Liqpay using Ukrainian bank with MasterCard SecureCode whatsit for verification still wanted to verify me, pending micropayments to card no good since only tracked in GBP what with Liqpay wanting USD, so I talked to Liqpay who eventually talked to my card bank, Liqpay authorised payment, savechange converted it from USD to WMZ and I was able to pay the webnames invoice

Technical

root .htaccess sends bri.kz traffic to briks.si/! which sends it to YOURLS to handle

/.htaccess, mod_rewrite [P] no good all referrers briks.si itself; basic redirect, again no good, no referrers at all; solution [E ..] set environment variable between redirects.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^bri\.kz$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://briks.si/!/$1 [E=HTTP_REFERER:%{HTTP_REFERER}]

Note to self: $ git commit -a tends to update the remote files better than just $ git commit

It now has the features I was hacking in: alternative domain name, the other auto–discovery <link />

Just need to fix the Twitter Tools plugin add–on to use appropriate function call(s)

* add_filter(‘tweet_blog_post_url’, ‘…’);

lessn and shorty – standalone host-your-own short-url services

http://get-shorty.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=21

http://ƨ.ws/shorty

http://www.subtraction.com/2006/01/17/get-shorty

http://www.subtraction.com/2006/08/24/announcing-s

lessn is very simple, you get one username / password and next to no interface – does have bookmarklet

shorty could give you multiple users (database allows for it); however, that part of the interface seems to be absent – +ve human-readable links; excluding backwards–s dot double–u ess

Looking at http://yourls.org/ too, how many different schemes does one need‽

Disconnected thoughts:

been playing with short url technologies, WordPress and the inevitable short domain names, IDNs that look cool / shorter.

Choices influenced by Zeldman’s “Shorten this” [http://zeldman.com/x/50] and the comments attached to it.

WordPress plug-ins for shorter links – short link, short url, la petite url [ or le petite url <sic>, «le petit url» might be correct, mais my GCSE French didn’t cover the web ].

causerelatedmarketing.co.uk – a mouthful (especially with yyyy/mm/slug on the end); crm♻.ws is much more manageable for 140 character stuff

♻ influenced by @daringfireball / John Gruber’s ✪df.ws – even went to the same registrar!

Initially set up shorturl (used exactly as Zeldman does, except under the default letter); with a single tweet to test.

l p u [1.06] : allows http:// in prefix, then prints that after blog’s domain leading to http://example.comhttp://short-domain.tld/ as prefix to short links – need to make $blogurl = ”; rather than get_bloginfo(‘siteurl’);

produces short links of definable length out of any of a-z, A-Z and 0-9 or a combination; these are generated at the point of a post’s publication, or alteration in the case that l p u [1.06] has been added to an existing self&ndash;hosted WordPress blog [ wordpress.com blogs get an auto-generated wp.me short link ]

short link works in a different way, making use of a post’s numeric ID as its short URL – this doesn’t require an existing post to be altered to be available

crm♻.ws is just an alias (ServerAlias, mod_vhost_alias) of causerelatedmarketing.co.uk

/domains/c/a/causerelatedmarketing.co.uk and
/domains/x/n/xn--crm-k05a.ws are both symbolic links to the same place in the filesystem, xn--crm-k05a.ws being the punycode representation

none really handle having a different domain for your short URLs very neatly without some hacking

WordPress plugins

ShortURL … return $shortlink; instead of return get_bloginfo(‘url’) . “/” . $shortlink;
.htaccess tweaked :
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^xn--crm-k05a\.ws$
RewriteRule ^u/([0-9]+)$ u.php?$1|$2
(adding RewriteCond)

PHP-centric tech., since I don’t grok perl, python, ruby

SQL ess cue ell [ sequel? ] – was listening to Sitepoint podcast …

Lots of .htaccess mod_rewrite hackery needed when a site reports itself as domain0.tld0 when visited at domain1.tld1; the judicious use of RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} certainly helps, especially when one filesystem is seen as different sites, subdirectories of the root; shopping.chrs.nl being a sibling of who-is.chrs.nl, itself an alias of domain0.tld0.

Twitter Blog plug-in hacked about so that la-petite-url links used instead of bit.ly – and since I didn’t have a recent enough php, json_decode() is missing… and the replacement function has output in the form of an array, not an object.