Cligs really needs a Firefox extension and I just don’t have the time to do it properly. So if you’re a Firefox extension developer or looking to learn how to develop extensions for lots of fun, great fame, and some fortune, we need to talk!

To get started, please comment below with your name, website, your availability to start work, a "pitch" about your work, and an email address I can reach you at. The comments are moderated so no one but me will see your comment. We’ll get to the money talk once we start talking.

I have the extension spec’ed out to a large degree. On the other hand, I also value your expertise in the area so your input and suggestions will count a lot.

Why do this?

• You’ll get lots of promotion and usage. This is currently the most requested feature of Cligs.
• You’ll get a link to your website from a Cligs page that will be promoted and linked to a lot.
• Do a good job and I’ll recommend you to my friends when they need an extension done.
• It’ll be great fun working with a fellow coder who understands what you’re talking about instead of being a clueless client (you know that counts).

So comment below with your details and let’s talk. Thanks!

Following yesterday’s major update, some users quickly noted the loss of some interesting information in their Cligs List page. Primarily, the destination URL was not shown for the Last 100 Hits list, and the titles of the cligs were missing too.

I’ve now fixed these two issues and added a nifty little bit of extra information in the Destination column, namely the domain name of the destination URL. This is very useful if you have a title for your clig because it quickly tells you something about the destination URL without hovering over the title and looking at the browser’s status bar. If you don’t have a title, a pretty version of the URL is shown along with the domain name too.

Also added: the newest 10 cligs list now shows the hits each of those cligs has received.

Again, as ever, please let me know if there is something missing or something can be improved, and I’ll fix it. Thanks!

Let’s think about one scenario for second: imagine you are an affiliate marketer promoting an Amazon product on Twitter or Facebook. You share a link pointing to the specially-crafted affiliate link to amazon.com; you may even shorten it using any of the bog-standard URL shortening services out there.

But there is a problem: Your link points to the amazon.com affiliate and so you’ll lose affiliate click throughs, and their money, from visitors outside the USA. UK visitors will edit out the URL to point to amazon.co.uk. German visitors will go to amazon.de. Can we fix this?

Right Clig fixes solves this problem! Right Clig allows you to tell Cligs of alternative destination URLs that are targeted based on the visitor’s country. What you do is create "rules" that tell Cligs something like "if the visitor is from the UK, send them to this URL instead" and "if the visitor is from Germany, send them to that URL".

What this means is that you create affiliate links and put them as alternatives and let Cligs do the heavy lifting for you.

Don’t believe me? Below is a demo video of Right Clig in action. It shows you how you can start using it now and stop losing money immediately. It’s a short demo but it shows you everything you need to know about how powerful Right Clig is!

Right Clig Demo from Pierre Far on Vimeo.

Also hot today is the official launch of WP-to-Twitter. This is a Wordpress plugin that automatically posts your blog posts onto twitter using Cligs as the URL shortening service.

Not only that, if you create an API key from your account and tell WP-to-Twitter about it, the cligs it creates become part of your account so you get to see their statistics. Is this cool or what?

Things you need to know:

• The plugin’s home page: WP-to-Twitter.
• The official announcement.
• The developer is my friend Joe Dolson. He’s a great guy and a great developer if you need good accessible websites. You can follow him on twitter too: @joedolson.
• WP-to-Twitter is part of the official WP plugins directory.
• WP-to-Twitter supports automatic updates if you’ve set it up on your blog.

The waiting is finally over: the updates I’ve been talking about are being uploaded to the server as we speak and so it’s time to explain them Here goes:

Updated Design

This will be the first thing you will notice. Just for me, please press Control-F5 to make sure everything gets refreshed from the server like images and stylesheets. It shouldn’t be necessary, but hey, it’s technology.

The design will constantly evolve as I find out what the community likes best and what serves the Cligs service the best.

Updated Edit Clig Page

The Edit Clig pages have been updated to accomodate various enhancements. In no particular order, they are:

Vanity URL

Finally, you can now have a clig like:

http://cli.gs/cool-name

Instead of the usual randomly generated 6-letter name. You can find this feature in the Edit Clig page.

Right Clig: Advanced Clig Features

This is by far the most important update. Right Clig is the home of many advanced features to come and we kick things off with geotargeting. As of now, you can specify geotargeted alternative URLs for your clig so that visitors from different countries are forwarded to different destinations. More in an upcoming post.

Quick Posting to Twitter & Pownce

Cligs is heavily used on twitter and Pownce and so now when you create a new clig, you will see the logos of twitter and Pownce. Click either of them and you will be taken to the correct site with your status update ready for submission. This does *not* auto-post - you still have to hit the submit button, but it does mean you can edit the post.

Updated Cligs List

The My Cligs List has now been updated massively. Instead of dumping all of your cligs on one page, it’s a bit smarter now, displaying:

• A more prominent search feature. Use it, love it, and abuse it. It’s good for you
• A list of the ten most newly created cligs. Because they’re typically the most important ones.
• A list of cligs that got your most recent 100 hits. This is a bit subtle to explain: all your cligs get a constant flux of incoming hits. Of those hits, the most recent 100 are summarized, grouped by the cligs that got them. So if one clig got the 100 most recent hits, you’ll see only that clig. If the 100 hits came to 100 different cligs, each at one hit per clig, then you’ll see 100 cligs listed. Most likely, you’ll see something in between.
• An executive summary of traffic and clig count. The Executive Summary will constantly evolve to include more overall analytics and more insights. For now, it’s really just the basics.

Two New Views

The My Cligs page now links to two new clig views:

• Grouped View: The previous default where the cligs are grouped by destination URL.
• List View: A new sortable (yes, sortable in your browser) table of all the cligs with their main stats. Just click on the table’s column headings to sort the table.

In Conclusion…

This is a major update that’s been in the works for weeks. It’s been tested massively, but as with any big changes, things might still be broken. As ever, feedback and bug reports are greatly appreciated and will definitely be heard. Most of this update’s changes are community requests. You can make requests at We Want and of course contact me directly.

I get a lot of questions about Cligs and how it works and the stats it shows, so I thought instead of answering common questions individually, I would answer them here for the benefit of everyone. This is the first of a hopefully regular feature. So ask away

Today’s question: What are the "no referer" hits that show up in the clig statistics?

Answer: This is most common when cligs are posted on social sites like Twitter. It has two main causes:

• Bots (crawlers)
• People clicking through from desktop clients

Let’s stick to posting a clig on Twitter example. Lots of services keep track of the links posted on Twitter like MicroBlogBuzz, TwitterBuzz, and Twitturly. These services are useful and fun, but there are others that may not be as nice to have around. Regardless, all of these services need to check out the URLs that are posted on Twitter, and they do that by sending out a bot (also called a crawler or robot or spider) to fetch the URL, and this gets logged by Cligs because it’s a perfectly valid request of your clig. Other good example of no referer hits are GoogleBot, Yahoo! Slurp and msnbot that index the web for Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft Live search engines. These are logged by Cligs and they get their own special section in the Cligs analytics.

The other main reason is someone clicking on the link from a Twitter desktop client or an email client (if the clig is emailed). This will open a browser window or tab that requests the clig without giving any referer info because there isn’t one.

There are other minor reasons but the above two reasons cover 99% of the cases.

And again, any questions you’d like answered, just drop me a line.

Short summary: the root of the slowness problem has been identified and a partial fix implemented. A full fix requires some re-coding of the way Cligs works and will take a few days, and I’ve already started. Of course I won’t roll it out unless I’m sure it works well, hence the short delay.

The server is now humming along nicely now but no doubt it will require an upgrade in the coming few weeks. Any news will be posted here on the blog and also on twitter (follow @cligs).

Long story (if you’re not a coder, it’s OK to skip this bit ): The root of the problem was the way PHP handles session files on Ubuntu (it is Debian-specific) and how Cligs is designed to run. Without going into the full details, the server’s filesystem managed to acquire millions of files in one directory. This slowed down the site massively. The fix was to clear out the directory and tweak the PHP garbage collector’s settings to be more aggresive in its cleaning job. End result? Removing >800k files results in a huge performance boost, along with ~25ish% drop in memory usage. Not bad!