For some of you, Cligs is running a bit slowly, certainly slower than it usually does. This morning the site was down for a short while. The reason? Ironically your success The Cligs database is getting very large because of the number of short URLs and the traffic they’re all getting. How big? In the past few weeks Cligs has clocked in well over 1 million forwards and the traffic is only going up.

So the first thing to do is stabilize the system enough to keep it up. A slightly slower site is a lot better than a dead site. I just tweaked the database a little bit and it seems to be a lot better already. Over the weekend I’ll be investigating and tweaking things more.

But this is a long term focus of course. You don’t know how a system will break until it grows. As Cligs grows I’m sure other bottlenecks will come up and rest assured I’ll be working hard to fix them. I’ll gut out and restructure the system if need be, but it will keep serving you short URLs and good analytics!

Onwards and upwards! Keep Cligging

A few days ago, I asked the Cligs community to vote for Cligs on Lifehacker as they were doing a poll on the best URL shortening services. Well the results are in and Cligs is on of the best 5 URL shortners as voted by you and the Lifehacker community!

So… thank you very much for the support!

It gets better: Lifehacker is having a follow-on vote putting these top 5 head to head. Like las time, if you can spare a minute, that would be greatly appreciated. The voting this time is much easier than last time: just select Cligs from the options and press the vote button, and done

The new vote is here.

Image credit: Photo from gi on flickr.

As the first ever Google Android phone, the G1 from T-Mobile, is released, Nadir Garouche published the user agent of the G1’s browser.

And so now with this piece of information, the Cigs mobile support is expanded to support the G1.

I’d love a screenshot if anyone has a G1 already Thanks!

I woke up this morning and found that Lifehacker is doing a poll on URL shortening services. So if you got a minute and you really like Cligs, I would greatly appreciate a quick vote.

Go to the Lifehacker post and comment in this format:

Vote: cli.gs

You can add on a new line why you like Cligs, and please do if you can.

Cligs FTW! Thanks!

Yesterday I came across a service called backtype which is a very cool blog comment search engine. The good folks at backtype even have an API that allow us to tap into their search index.

So of course, I had to add it to Cligs. As of just now, a new tab has been added to the Clig Social Media Mentions and the Destination Social Media Mentions sections of the cligs details pages. The tab searches blog comments using backtype and displays all mentions that backtype knows about that mention your clig. Neat!

What this means is that now we have quite an extensive look at where your clig is being talked about: twitter, friendfeed, blog posts, blog comments, and the whole web too. All in one handy page only on Cligs.

The question is: are there any services that you think belong on the clig details pages? Give me a shout and I’ll see about adding them.

Finally, I’d like to thank Christopher from backtype for answering my questions yesterday. Thank you!

I don’t need to explain this much as this image does the work nicely:

Yep, go to any Clig Details page and you’ll see a fancy new flash map of the world. It’s interactive, meaning you can hover over the countries and see hit counts from them. And you can zoom in, pan, zoom out, and general travel the world looking at your hits from individual countries.

You’ll notice that only the countries that have hits are clickable, and those are shown in a shade of red: the darker the red the more hits from that country. The red is very distinctive from the background light pastel colors of the other countries.

For your navigation, look to the left and you’ll see the standard zoom controls, panning controls, and a home icon that zooms you back out completely. Also in the top right corner is a small world map that you can use to navigate too.

As ever, feedback and thoughts in the comments below or via the contact form.

Recently, the most requested feature for Cligs on We Want has been a way to search your cligs. This is a very important feature request and one I am very happy to announce that it’s ready for you to break use and test.

The search is very simple: near the top of the My Cligs List page (slightly renamed now, by the way), you’ll see a search form. Enter a query and it searches both the destination URLs and the clig titles. The results are shown in a format showing the basic details. A screenshot is below:

As the post title says, this is a beta roll-out. The key here is to get the function - something! - working in your hands and I ask you for feedback on how you would like it to evolve to serve your needs. I want to build a search function that you will use and this is the seed from which to grow. Feedback at the usual place or comment below.

Cligs is growing faster than expected and today the server told me about deciding to be up but offline for some odd reason. I rebooted it, resulting in a brief down-time, and it’s fine now.

However, as we speak I’m preparing Cligs to be moved to a much bigger server that will serve you better. The move will happen in the next couple of hours and there will be another brief downtime for the actual switch.

While we’re talking about the server stuff, let me tell you about the backup strategy of Cligs. Once a day, in the early hours of the morning GMT, a backup of the whole server is taken. Once a week on Sunday, another weekly backup is taken. More backup options and strategies are on the drawing board.

Rest assured as Cligs grows with your help, I’ll be here, and getting help as necessary, to make sure Cligs continues to serve you best. Thank you for using Cligs!

Introducing the brand spanking new Cligs friendfeed room. So if you use friendfeed, it’s now easier than ever to keep track of Cligs developments.

The friendfeed room will also double as the Cligs forum for now. The idea is that we all care about Cligs, short URLs, and analytics, and now we have a place to talk. So come on, subscribe

Looking through We Want, I see three very related feature requests:

• Make Cligs searchable, 6 votes
• Sort Cligs by hits or by date, 3 votes
• Make Cligs Paged, 2 votes

Together, they point to one thing: the cligs list page is not working well for some people. Honestly, as I started using Cligs more and more, I started wanting more too. So the next big thing coming to Cligs is a new and improved cligs list page.

Why post about this? Two reasons:

• What else would you like to see on the cligs List page? Sorting and search are coming for sure, but while I’m hacking at this, might as well do all the changes in one go.
• You might notice some things change over time; little tweaks here and there. The first one is already visible: the list page now loads much much faster because I found a way to optimize some of the backend. Changes like this will be rolled out if it makes sense to do so.

So please either comment here or add more comments on We Want. Thanks!