Stealth Camping

Posted on 17 March, 2008 by maximinus in Rant

Further to my earlier post regarding domain camping / squatting, I've recently stumbled upon a sly tactic from Bitvise, who I've found produce and sell an SSH daemon for Windows.  They've purchased the domain name putty.org, and have on it a very basic webpage, with a description of PuTTY and a link to the official PuTTY download page.  That's not the bad bit, however.

In addition to these details and this link, Bitcise have details (and links, of course) for their products Tunnelier (essentially an alternative to PuTTY and WinSCP) and WinSSHD.  WinSSHD is the one which caught my eye, because for too long, the only way to get SSH access to a Windows machine was using Cygwin.  Apparently, WinSSHD has been around for a while also, but I'd never heard of it before - probably because it's commercial software - and it costs $40USD for a single-machine personal license - much more if you need more licenses or are a business or even non-profit organisation.  There isn't any mention of it being non-free software on either the putty.org page or the pages that it links to for the Bitcise products

I wouldn't even be quite so annoyed at BitVise's sly tactic if they at least had a decent product - but I tested the trial, and found it to be very poor indeed.  Whilst it gave full access to the Windows filesystem (which Cygwin doesn't - at least by default), its shell was absolutely horrible.  Its command set appears to be some kind of mixture of Windows/DOS and unix commands, and it has serious issues if you try using a terminal window larger than the default size.  It also seemed to have difficulty actually displaying any more than one screen of text - it didn't allow scrolling, and it didn't clear the previous content, so after the end of the new line, the rest of the previous line would still sit there.  When I saw this, I couldn't be bothered testing any more, and immediately uninstalled the trial, because there's no way that it could be usable in that state.

Maybe it's not too bad if all you want is secure remote access to a Windows PC's filesystem - I didn't try using it for SCP, but they claim that it performs well when used with Tunnelier.  It might even do alright if you only want to tunnel other services (such as Remote Desktop or VNC) through the SSH connection (which would have been my primary use, as I used to use Cygwin for, before it decided that it no longer wanted to work on my PC).

That's not really the point of this post, anyway.  The point is that Bitvise are using a tactic which is essentially domain squatting, making it look as though it's somehow linked to PuTTY, and using it as a vehicle to advertise their commercial software, which they are essentially passing off as free/open-source software (by failing to mention anything about it being commercial software or how much it costs) in order to draw you in.  This really bugs me, because they're using underhand tactics to try to steal market share from free software.

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ChessCode

Posted on 15 March, 2008 by maximinus

You've probably heard of LOLCODE, an esoteric programming language, and quite possibly also of LOLCode.NET, a .NET ("a LOLCode compiler for the .NET platform").  Tonight, I witnessed (and partook in) the design of a new esolang - ChessCode.

It was spawned by and IRC discussion on A(a)rgh! - which silentcoder stated is "like assembler for chess players."  This then moved into a discussion about a chess-based esolang - and hence ChessCode was born.  I'm not actually sure that "discussion" is the best word for it - it was mostly a monologue from silentcoder, with interjections from EvilTerran - and I then found myself inexplicably being drawn into the discussion.  Around half an hour later, we were done, and silentcoder wrote up the gory details (linked above).

Here's a (very) brief rundown of ChessCode: a program consists of a series of "games" - with each game consisting of a full set of pieces being placed on a board (in programmer-defined locations), and the pieces making only legal chess moves.  Pawns hold value; other pieces represent operations.  When a pawn is taken by a piece other than a pawn, that piece's operation is performed on the value of the pawn (white=1, black=0) and the square on which it resides (also w=1, b=0).  The result is added to the output buffer, which results in a character being written every time a byte is completed.  See silentcoder's post for more details.

If you have any questions or comments on ChessCode, or would like to try writing a ChessCode interpreter or compiler, please feel free to contact silentcoder, or leave a comment below.


Update:
After I left for sleep, some further discussion was had, and the specs now provide for conditionals and looping, and there is now a two-byte stack rather than having the data go straight to an output buffer.  See link above for further details and to keep up to date - silentcoder would really like to see this become properly Turing-complete, so keep an eye on it!

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Invitation to Spam

Posted on 12 March, 2008 by maximinus in Rant, Web development

Running ShrinkThisLink, a free link shrinker, isn't quite as easy as you might expect.  As I recently mentioned, I recently commissioned a new spam detection system in order to try to pick up on links being used in spam without needing anyone to report the spam.

So far, this seems to be working quite well.  One way I can tell that it's working is that the number of people emailing me in relation to spammed links has increased.  You may be wondering right now how such an increase can be a good sign.  If you are, you evidently haven't run a website which spammers attempt to (ab)use.

I endeavour to reply to every single legitimate email sent to ShrinkThisLink - by hand, not with any kind of automated system.  Unfortunately, some people not only fail to recognise the email as spam and discard it, but proceed to click the links contained within.  When faced with a page informing them that "the link you have attempted to view has been blocked due to spamming or other abuse" and providing them with an email address to contact "if you believe this is in error," some of these people then proceed to contact that address and ask for further details on the spammed offer.  Surely replying to the email would make more sense?  I've even had some who forward the spam on, which, I will admit, is a step up from the people who complain about a link being blocked, but don't actually mention what the link in question is.


Between the reports of spam and the spam that's been forwarded in requests for further information on the "fantastic offer," it has become evident that spammers have realised that they really don't need to set up a mail server (or compromise one) in order to send their spam.  A disturbing trend is to use Yahoo! Groups invitations as a medium for spamming.

Yahoo! Groups invitations can be sent to any email address, and can contain text (including links) specified by the person sending them.  Spammers are taking advantage of these two facts to point people at websites completely unrelated to Yahoo! Groups en masse.  Yahoo! don't seem to be willing to do anything at all about this problem - I have personally reported several sets of Groups invitation spam, and have seen no evidence of them taking any action whatsoever.

My suggestion to Yahoo! - and indeed to anyone who currently offers an "invitation" sysem which allows the user to enter email addresses and arbitrary message content - is quite simple: change your approach.  I understand that the concept of inviting people to the website can be useful; however providing a form which accepts whatever the user provides, slaps it in an email and sends it to whatever addresses that same user provides, is the wrong way to go about it.  If you want to provide an invitation system, give the user a system which generates invitation links - either time-limited or single-use links.  Make the user send the emails themselves.  If they're genuinely trying to invite people (who they know) to the site, they'll be happy to send the links themselves (either via email or another form of communication such as posting the link on a blog or website, or sending it via instant message).  Spammers won't be so interested in the invitation system, though, since it won't actually benefit them in any way.

If, for some reason, you really think you need to keep the email-sending system, do not allow URLs in the message content (or, alternatively, don't even let the user edit the message).  If it's an invitation to a website, the website sending the email should automatically add the invitation link - and that should be the only link necessary (except perhaps a "don't send me these annoying invitation emails in future" link).  Please stop inviting spammers to send as much spam as they like through your site for free.  This means you, Yahoo!.

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A Torrent of Updates

Posted on 10 March, 2008 by maximinus

Chalk another one up for BitTorrent.  Arstechnica reports that INHOLLAND University's IT department has just ditched 20 of the 24 servers they used to use for rolling out updates - by switching from a traditional client-server model for updates to a BitTorrent-based distribution system.

What used to take four days now takes four hours.  Before, the servers would have to handle up to around 22.2TB of updates, to cover all 6,500-odd desktop machines around the campus, with the updates all having to be rolled out to all 24 servers, and then an average of around 271 machines vying for bandwidth to download the updates from each server, it's no wonder it took so long.  Thanks to BitTorrent, the few remaining servers need only dish out a few copies, with all the other machines picking up the updates from each other, the servers merely coordinating the efforts.

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More Phishing

Posted on 6 March, 2008 by maximinus

Over the past few weeks, I'd received a couple of identical phishing emails, targetting customers of a Canadian bank.  The emails have a spoofed sender address of abuse@<target bank's domain> - and the first couple of times, I just let it go, because I couldn't be bothered reporting it (and I hadn't realised that it was a bank).

Yesterday, I received yet another one.  I decided that since it was still going on, I should report it.  I forwarded the email (as an attachment, to preserve full headers) to abuse@<bank's domain>, with a note explaining what it was.  I then went to bed.

This morning, I checked my email, only to find a failure notice from my mail server, informing me that the bank's mail server had rejected my message:

Remote host said: 550 This message contains a virus
(Phishing.Heuristics.Email.SpoofedDomain)

It's great that their server has detected a phishing email - but how can I report the phish, if their mail server won't accept the message?  I guess I'll just have to give them the full headers and the message content sans-link...

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Smells Phishy...

Posted on 1 March, 2008 by maximinus

Today, through new spam detection systems recently implemented on ShrinkThisLink, the free link shrinker, I spotted not one but TWO MySpace phishing scam sites.

One of these used a domain name registered with GoDaddy to redirect to a Google Pages site, which then submitted a form to a free PHP hosting company.  The whois information on this domain reads like it was written by a 12-year-old:

Registrant Name:Mike Hunt
Registrant Street1:123 tip top road
Registrant City:UrAnus
Registrant State/Province:California
Registrant Postal Code:90210
Registrant Country:US
Registrant Phone:+1.9119115555

The phishing site itself was done reasonably well - with the exception of the URL, it looked like MySpace.

The other site, on the other hand, took a while to load, left several images broken and didn't bother with the favicon.

This whole thing raises one important question though: why phish for MySpace accounts?  Is there really anything to gain from it, other than perhaps "friends" listed on the site?  If that's what you're after, why not try writing an XSS worm or something, rather than outright stealing accounts?  I know MySpace attempts to block all such things, but even so, surely stealing accounts is a much slower, less effective way to do it.

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Moonwalk

Posted on 19 February, 2008 by maximinus in JavaScript, Web design, Web development

It's not all fun and games in web development.  Sometimes, clients request odd things, such as redirecting the domain name for a defunct Japanese site of theirs to another Japanese website.  We were given the URL to redirect to; upon clicking through to the site, we discovered that it was an equally dated site; not only are some of the links broken on certain pages, but there's an animated GIF of a kiwi in the corner of the site.

One of my colleagues pointed out that it looked as if the kiwi was moonwalking on the spot.  This gave me an idea to liven up the site - make the kiwi actually moonwalk across the page header.

Of course, not being one of our sites, we don't have access to the files, so I can't make it permanently happen.  What I can do, though, is use a javascript: address in the address bar to play around with the page once it's loaded.  622B 577B 477B 494B of JavaScript later, I have a moonwalking kiwi:

1. Visit the site, and wait for it to finish loading.
2. Grab the moonwalk JavaScript, paste it into your address bar (making sure it's all on one line) and hit enter.
3. Enjoy.

You may have noticed that there are two three crossed-out sizes; I decided to do a bit of optimisation and refactoring, bringing it down to 577B, then thought that while I was at it, I may as well tackle the IE issue.  This is where I discovered something odd:
Internet Explorer 6 will only allow 501 characters in the address bar before it fails.  It fails silently if you exceed this limit.  As a result of this, I started shrinking the code as much as possible, which involved a bit of code golf with a few guys in an IRC channel - we decided to call this "JavaScript Hack Minigolf."  The end result was a lean 477 characters.  I also worked out what was happening in Opera - the version I've got installed (9.02) appears to, at least by default on Windows, stop the script running after a set period and return things to their initial status.  It's apparently fine in 9.24 on Linux, though.  I've now discovered that IE wasn't aligning the inserted div properly, and the fix has now brought it back up to 494 characters - thankfully still within IE6's limit.  I've also found that IE7 doesn't have the 501-character limit (I haven't checked if there's a higher limit or no limit).

Thanks to Arachnid for playing a round of JSH Minigolf with me, and to Pic, silentcoder, langly and warfreak2 for their moral support.

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Touchscreen Eee coming?

Posted on 19 January, 2008 by maximinus in Interface design

Well, it looks as if Asus have indeed caught the wave - sources indicate that Asus are currently sampling 4-wire resistive touchscreen technology, for inclusion in a 9" version (this may be the previously-announced 8.9" model, with the figure rounded up - or a full 9" screen - nobody is quite sure yet).  With the manufacturing cost set to only increase by around USD$15 because of it, it hopefully won't impact on the price too much.

Now I guess we'll just have to wait and see both what the screen resolution is and how much a 9" touchscreen Eee will set you back.

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Googlebomb?

Posted on 15 January, 2008 by maximinus in Rant, Web development

After 40,000+ pageviews and several inbound links, my posting here a couple of days ago entitled "Has Google gone MAD?" managed to plant itself in some very high positions in Google search results, including the #1 spot for the search term "Google gone mad" - which I thought was quite neat:


This evening, however, I went to show somebody that I was, in fact, top of the search results for "Google gone mad" - only to find that I wasn't.  I hunted through the first couple of pages... no sign of my blog... I went through the entire top hundred - and still nothing.  Then I searched for the entry directly by URL - and sure enough, it's not there.

I can only surmise that it's been removed from the Google index because it's been detected by Googlebomb prevention systems - gaining several inbound links and shooting to the #1 spot within a few short hours does seem somewhat suspicious, I guess.

This does, however, seem like something which could all to easily be abused; if people could previously perform googlebombs such as the infamous George W. Bush "miserable failure" bomb, surely it wouldn't be hard for people with malicious intent to similarly bomb a 3rd party's website, thus getting it completely removed from Google's index.  The impact is not as high as it could be, since it only seems to affect the single URL, not the entire domain; however I think it quite likely that there's some kind of threshold at which the entire site would be blocked, i.e. after a certain number of bombs on the one site, it would be assumed that the entire site is up to no good.

Update (16 January):
This evening, I checked again, and found that my top position has been reinstated.  This leaves me wondering quite what has been happening...

Update (21 January):
For the past few days, I seem to have lost the top spot again (for "google gone mad") - I can't find this site anywhere in the first few pages of results.  However, it does seem to be top for "google gone mad techblog" - so it's back in the index, but has completely lost its ranking for "google gone mad" - which seems to indicate that this effect could still be used to kill specific keywords / key phrases for any given website.

Update:
My blog seems to have settled again in top spot for the original phrase "Google gone mad" - so perhaps the detection systems respond to the new link rate dropping by slowly returning the page's rankings.  Sustained new link generation, on the other hand, could possibly keep a page out of the rankings on a more long-term basis; however if the rate is calculated based on number of unique websites (rather than webpages) which link to the site, it may prove difficult to sustain the required rate.

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Has Google gone MAD?

Posted on 12 January, 2008 by maximinus

... or are they simply honoring Donald Knuth's 70th birthday (which was on the 10th of January) in a cool and somewhat quirky manner?

Google Calculator can now perform calculations in Donald Knuth's units of length, volume and mass - the Potrzebie System, as defined in MAD Magazine issue #33.  (Thanks to Jeff Atwood for making the relevant pages available online via his blog, Coding Horror!)

Some samples of calculations in the Potrzebie System and some conversions to SI units:
pi potrzebie in mm
1 dekapotrzebie * 2.3 dekapotrzebie * 3.2 dekapotrzebie in ngogn
e * 42 farshimmelt blintz
1 furshlugginer ngogn in litres
pi hectopotrzebie per hour in furlongs per fortnight

Try it yourself, have some fun... and ponder over what other units Google may add in the future...


Update: Sorry folks, wasn't expecting quite so much load all at once; I've made some server config tweaks which should hopefully speed things up a bit.

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Asus Eee PC

Posted on 9 January, 2008 by maximinus in Linux, Rant

I'm sure you've seen them - just about every man and his dog seems to have bought an Eee lately.  A lot of people seem to be modding in touchscreens - which I think is a really cool idea, and makes it much more usable (personally I think the touchpad, no matter how sensitive, is far too small to use properly).

Asus have now announced that they will be releasing Eee PCs with 8" and 8.9" screens - which I think is a good move, since the existing 7" screen looks as though it's swimming in an ocean of wasted space.  What surprises me, especially given the number of people modding them in, is that they have not announced a touchscreen version.  Also, the 8" version will have the same resolution as the 7" version - it would have been good for them to knock it up a notch; I certainly hope they do for the 8.9" version.

If Asus can pull off an 8.9" touchscreen with a decent resolution, with decent battery life, I'll be very tempted to buy one - and I'm sure many other people who are currently interested, but not enough to buy one, will be too... I'd say it'll increase sales quite nicely if they get it right.

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ColdFusion 8 AJAX

Posted on 22 October, 2007 by maximinus in Web design, Web development, Interface design

I've lately been playing around a bit with the new ColdFusion 8 AJAX and related stuff.  There are a few different things I'd like to touch on here:

• cfajaxproxy;
• cfwindow; and
• cflayout / cflayoutarea (tabbed layout)
  

cfajaxproxy
This one's a really great idea - basically, with one tag, CF8 will automatically create a JavaScript class which mirrors the CFC you name.  It acts as an interface for the CFC - you create an instance of it in your JavaScript, and then call the (public, remote-access) methods from the CFC as if from ColdFusion.  It returns whatever the CFC's method would return.

I'm using this to easily turn a static calendar (based on Randy Drisgill's Simple ColdFusion Calendar - I fixed the year bug (my way, see comment on Randy's blog post), converted it to a method in a CFC, changed it to use DIVs instead of tables and generally tidied things up, rewriting some chunks of it.  I then made it so that it doesn't require reloading the page, but instead uses JavaScript to swap out the calendar for a whole new one.  I've yet to make it also display information in the day DIVs, but that will be coming soon.

More at CF8 Livedocs.


cfwindow
This one's also kind of neat; it allows you to easily create a draggable, closable 'window' on the page.  You can either have it show on page load, or use JavaScript to trigger it to pop up whenever and however you want.  You can either specify content within the cfwindow tags, or specify a source file - if you specify a source file, it'll load that page using AJAX and shove its contents into the 'window' - no, not using an iframe, but actually using AJAX.

I do have a couple of gripes with it, though:

• It's not the easiest thing in the world to style, and the default styles are a bit crappy - especially with some colours behind it, which can make some of the outer lines 'disappear' and thus make the box look a bit odd; and
• It doesn't have a 'minimise' button.  It's based on Ext JS - which does have a 'minimise' button, which shrinks the 'window' to its titlebar.

I'm really not sure why there is no way to add the minimise button in the cfwindow tag; it'd be rather handy.  I'll have to have a play and see if I can add it by gaining access to the underlying Ext JS window object.

More at CF8 Livedocs.


cflayout / cflayoutarea
Okay, so I've only actually used the tab layout so far.  But even so, I've discovered a few cool things and a few annoying things.  First off, it's really easy to use these tags; just nest a new cflayoutarea within the cflayout tag to add a new tab.  Just like cfwindow, you can either specify the contents of each tab between the cflayoutarea tags, or use the 'source' attribute to specify a file which will be loaded in using AJAX.  With both cfwindow and tabs, you can also use refreshOnActivate (refreshOnShow for cfwindow) to tell it to fetch a new copy of the contents (when using 'source') when opening the window / showing the tab.

Issues I have with the tabbed layout are:

• The tabs are rather poorly styled by default; the top left corner of each tab in particular looks odd / broken.  Thankfully, FireBug showed me that it's relatively easily to restyle the tabs - I've made mine quite plain and simple at the moment;
• The 'align' attribute of the cflayout tag relates to the tab content, not the tabs themselves - surely if I wanted to change the alignment of the content, I'd do it at the content level - or perhaps there could be an 'align' attribute on the cflayoutarea tag?  Tabs are stuck at the left hand side, unless you manually shift them with CSS as I have done; and
• There appears to be some weirdness with regards to the height of the content area when it contains absolutely positioned elements.  I'll need to investigate this a bit further.

More at CF8 Livedocs - cflayout and cflayoutarea


There may be more later, but right now I can't think of anything to add.

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Xtraordinary Complexity

Posted on 23 August, 2007 by maximinus in Web design, Rant, Web development, Interface design

Last weekend, Xtra performed an email system "upgrade" which resulted in their customers' mail being inaccessible for 24 hours.  This in itself is not necessarily bad - they did give warning that it was going to happen, and it's understandable that such things need to be done from time to time.  The problems begin with the length of the outage - a full 24 hours, with some customers having no access for longer than this.

The main problems, however, relate to the consequences of this "upgrade" - and begin with those who use a mail client (i.e. not webmail) to access their email.  As part of the upgrade, Xtra changed their SMTP server address - and added mandatory SSL.  They do inform you (oddly enough, when you're trying to get to the "upgraded" webmail - but also over the phone if you lie and tell them that it's not to do with the mail server "upgrade" and thus can get through to a person rather than pre-recorded messages) that the address has changed - but never make mention of SSL.  They list the new port (465) and address (send.xtra.co.nz) but completely fail to mention that SSL is now mandatory.

This is a problem for those users - like my aunt, who has been unable to send email for several days until I was able to visit and sort it out - who do not know a lot about computers, the Internet or email, who perhaps, like my aunt, have had their computer set up by family or friends and know how to use it but not how to configure it.  In the case of my aunt, she managed to work out where to change the settings - with some help - and changed the address and port.  However, since there had been no mention of it at all, she did not enable SSL - and so still could not send email.  Although I know a bit about mail servers etc, and in fact run my own mail server, I didn't immediately recognise port 465 as being the standard SMTP over SSL port.  How anyone else is supposed to work it out, I don't know - a bit of deft googling managed to turn up this article on the Xtra site which eventually mentions that you need to enable SSL.


The next problem, which is probably even worse than that one, relates to the web mail system.  It used to be a relatively simple process to get to and use their webmail system - but no longer.  Especially if you haven't used the new system yet.

First off, you need to use a modern browser.  If your browser isn't supported, it doesn't tell you - it just sticks you in a loop of signing in, clicking through to continue a couple of times, and then being returned to the login page.  Once you find a browser in which it works, you have to go through several steps of pointless nonsense, including downloading and installing a few bits and pieces relating to their new "bubbles" - this took a few minutes on my aunt's ADSL connection; I shudder to think how long that would take on dialup.

Once you've finally managed to register for the new system, you log in and end up on an overcomplicated, customisable start page.  When you eventually locate the "Mail" link, and you move your mouse over it, a new box "slides" out from under it to reveal a summary listing new messages - just how good this is, I'm not sure, as my aunt had no new messages, so there was a large box with a small amount of text swimming in it to that effect.  Clicking on the Mail link took us to the new webmail interface - which I didn't have a good look at, but didn't look terribly easy to use or particularly good.  I think it might be using the current Yahoo! mail system, but, not having a Yahoo! account myself, I can't verify this.


Then there's the entire concept of a social networking site.  I would imagine that their users would fall into two broad categories:

• Those who, like my aunt, are not at all interested in this crap; and
• Those who are interested in a social networking site, and, as a result, are already signed up to at least one of the plethora of other free social networking sites out there

Also - I haven't investigated, so don't know if this is entirely accurate - surely using this system would be somewhat pointless, as I'd assume that only Xtra customers can get a "bubble page" or whatever it is they're calling them.  Even if other people can sign up for them, will anybody who's not an Xtra customer do so?  I would suggest that the answer is almost certainly "no" - at best, a few people might sign up out of morbid curiosity.  This means that you're essentially restricted to networking with other Xtra users - whereas if you use any of the other social networking sites out there, you can network with anybody with access to the Internet.


I'll admit that their old webmail system was old and was begging to be upgraded or replaced; but this is not the way they should have done it.  What they've done is alienate a lot of users, confuse many more and just brass off the rest.  That's just those of their customers who actually use their Xtra mail, of course - the rest of their customers won't even care in the slightest.

I think I heard that Xtra were saying that "Bubble" was going to provide "an exciting range of new services that will change the way you use the internet" - I'd say that the only way it has changed the way that some people use the Internet is which provider they use it through.

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Progress Bars

Posted on 14 August, 2007 by maximinus in Rant, Interface design

Currently preparing a machine for re-use by a new staff member who'll be starting tomorrow, I'm thus stuck uninstalling a bunch of no-longer-needed software (and will shortly be installing some more software).  This means that I'm once again faced with progress bars.

On the whole, they're a great idea - they give some idea of how long something is going to take.  However, a lot of companies - Microsoft being a big one - seem to be unable to use them properly.

A progress bar should fill up throughout the process - starting completely empty, and ending up full just as the process is completed.  Microsoft (and others), however, take various non-intuitive approaches which ruin the entire point of the progress bar:

• Progress bar fills up completely long before the process is complete - often with a message along the lines of "Time remaining: 0 seconds"
• Progress bar does not fill up, but rather has a small bar which scrolls along and back repeatedly (or just scrolls one way repeatedly)
• Progress bar fills up - then starts all over again for another sub-process, perhaps with a message indicating that it's now doing some other sub-process
• I have nothing against this, so long as there's also an overall progress bar - which there generally isn't

Those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head - there may be one or two other strange behaviours also.

All of these abnormal behaviours add only confusion to the system - not information, as a properly-used progress bar should - and, in my opinion, should be avoided unless there's a very good reason.

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New ShrinkThisLink Site Live!

Posted on 15 July, 2007 by maximinus in PHP, JavaScript, Web design, Web development

Finally, after months of on-and-off work, the new ShrinkThisLink site has gone live.  It features a new design, AJAX shrinking of links, instant link conversion using Javascript, an improved My ShrunkLinks feature (including link deletion) and more.  Hope you like it - your feedback is appreciated, either via comments on this blog post or by email (use the Contact link on ShrinkThisLink).

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