Today I’m going to show you a very neat trick you that lets you use Cligs in Firefox. It’s based on tweaking the settings of an extension called UrlbarExt, which has built-in support for various URL shortners including Cligs. The default Cligs usage creates a ‘public’ clig, i.e., one not associated with your account, but a simple edit of the settings fixes that for you.

What you need to do is install UrlbarExt and restart Firefox. Once you’re ready, watch the video below.

The video demos two tricks:

• How to edit the UrlbarExt settings to create cligs using your account.
• How to edit the UrlbarExt settings to use more than one Cligs account; for example, you might have several clients each with their separate Cligs account and you want to conveniently access them.

Edit A user requested that the instructions be added as text in this post, so here goes:

• Go to your API keys list, and copy and paste an API key. I recommend you create a new one for this purpose because I like having one API key for each application.
• Open the Tools menu, and choose Add-Ons.
• From the list, find the UrlbarExt entry, click it, and then click the Options button. This will bring up the settings window. Click the "TinyURL" tab (at the very top, second button from the left) to bring up the list of URL shortening services that the extension supports.
• Find the Cligs entry (near the middle) and double-click the Api column to edit the API URL.
• This is the tricky part: the default URL is this:
  http://cli.gs/api/v1/cligs/create?url=

  We need to edit that to tell Cligs to user you account, like so:

  http://cli.gs/api/v1/cligs/create?key=xxxx&appid=URLBarExt&url=

  The changes are highlighted in red. Replace the "key" variable (shown as a string of x’s) is your API key you copied in the first step.

• To make Cligs your default shortner, click the grey circle at the very left of the Cligs entry line. This should turn green. When it’s green it means it’s your default URL shortner, which is what you want
• Also, look around the other settings. A good one to consider is the option to automatically copy a short URL into the clipboard. This option is at the bottom right of the window.
• Click the OK button and close the Add-Ons window. You’re done!

The instructions to create another Cligs entry are the same, but instead of editing an existing one, you create a new one by clicking the + button at the right hand side. Edit it as before.

A small announcement for today: Cligs now has a dedicated channel on YouTube, affectionately called CligsTube. The URL for it is cli.gs/tube.

At the moment it’s empty but over the next few days (even as we speak…) a few videos are being uploaded. The point of this channel is to have all of the Cligs videos in one tidy place and YouTube is it.

The video being uploaded at the moment shows you how an awesome Firefox extension called UrlbarExt can be easily modified to use your Cligs account. Not just that, you can use multiple Cligs account using UrlbarExt, which is useful if you manage many accounts for, say, clients.

Again, the Cligs YouTube channel is called CligsTube. Please visit it, become friends with it (me!) and subscribe to the videos. Thanks!

Even more exciting news today: The ever useful Twitterfeed service now supports Cligs! Twitterfeed is an awesome service that monitors any blog feed and automatically posts your blog’s entries to Twitter. It’s used by many (many!) websites like Techcrunch. When a blog post is sent to Twitter, a link is automatically added to the post on your blog, and that link can now be a clig!

The Twitterfeed blog just announced the addition.

The integration of Cligs into Twitterfeed is complete as it allows you to enter a Cligs API key to use with the service (just select Cligs from the drop-down menu and the API key entry box pops up). This means that the cligs that Twitterfeed generates will automatically be added to your Cligs account.

Twitterfeed complements Joe Dolson’s WP-To-Twitter, which is a Wordpress plugin you can use on your own blogs to do the same function. Twitterfeed and WP-To-Twitter are aimed at different markets, and I’m happy Cligs is serving everyone depending on their needs.

I’d like to thank Mario Menti, the developer of Twitterfeed, for adding Cligs to his awesome service. And I’d like to thank all the Cligs and Twitterfeed users for asking for the integration. Your passion means that Cligs is now available to even more users!

To get updates about Twitterfeed, follow @mario on Twitter and Twitterfeed’s blog.

A hot topic on the internet at the moment is how to monitor API usage. Here on Cligs, API tracking is built into the Cligs service, and when I introduced the Cligs Ubiquity Command, I updated the API keys page to show API key usage data. But I’m always looking for ways to open up Cligs for more users and this is what I want to talk to you about today.

A hot new startup in this space is 3scale Networks, which bills itself as an online marketplace for APIs. As Techcrunch puts it:

3scale features an online marketplace where resources are provided for developers who use Web Services to discover relevant services and set up usage agreements with providers. 3scale’s Quality of Service monitoring keeps track of actual uptime and quality of the contracted Web Service.

As a marketplace and relationship manager, I see 3scale providing an extra level of service (3rd party monitoring) that some Cligs users might need. For example, I imagine corporate users having a single 3scale account through which they manage their usage of many APIs, of which Cligs is one.

The Integration

So as of now, the Cligs API has new support for monitoring through the 3scale Networks service. This means that if you are a 3scale account holder, you can use this new Cligs API and track it usage in your 3scale account. Just sign up at the Cligs API page on 3scale.

To emphasize this point: The Cligs API is getting an additional feature and the current API will remain the same and is not being discontinued. This is an extra level of service to open up Cligs to more users that require the kind of monitoring that 3scale provides. Neither is better or worse: if you want the 3scale monitoring, using the Cligs 3scale API; otherwise, use the Cligs API.

To use the 3scale monitoring, you need to have a Cligs account as well as the 3scale account, both of which are free. When you login to Cligs, visit the updated API Keys page and at the bottom you’ll find the 3scale section. There are two forms: one to enter your 3scale user key and one to remove your 3scale API key. When you use the new 3scale Cligs API, two things happen:

• The cligs you create will be added to your Cligs account, just like the current API.
• The API usage is reported to 3scale which logs it and displays it in your account.

Technical Details

The new API is almost identical to the current one. The are two differences:

• Slightly different API endpoint.
• Using your 3scale API key instead of a Cligs API key.

More details and documentation at the Cligs page on 3scale.

Update: To get your 3scale User API Key, login to 3scale, and then sign up to the Cligs contract (only one now, which is the free service) at http://www.3scale.net/cligs/cligs#contracts. Once you sign up, in the left navigation menu you’ll see My Bought Services. Click the Cligs link and you’ll see your API key on the Summary tab.

I don’t usually post about fixing bugs but this one is big enough and very annoying that it warranted a post.

The problem was this: you create a new clig with a destination URL of www.cnn.com instead of http://www.cnn.com/ . Although lacking the http:// bit (the protocol part of the URL), the URL is still accepted by Cligs. That’s the right decision on purely usability grounds, but it caused a knock-on effect on the fowarding.

See when a visitor requests a clig with a destination lacking the http:// bit, the browsers treat it as part of the Cligs website. So instead of being forwarded to http://www.cnn.com/, the browsers would think Cligs is forwarding them to http://cli.gs/www.cnn.com. This page doesn’t exist on Cligs and so visitors saw an 404 Not Found error. Not good.

This took a while to fix because I couldn’t reproduce the bug. I kept seeing odd requests in the log files and simply assumed someone did a a bad link to Cligs. It was very uncommon (maybe 1 request like this every 2-3 weeks), so I didn’t think it was a Cligs problem. But a few days ago, somone tweeted a clig and because the stars were aligned, the sun was shining, angels were singing, and I had a great cup of tea in my hand, my brain suddenly figured it out. I ran a few tests just now and implemented a fix.

So what happens now:

• As ever, you can create a clig with a destination starting with http:// or not. Up to you.
• If you don’t provide a protocol for the destination, Cligs will automatically prepend the protocol as http:// and thus forward correctly.
• Note that the default is HTTP not the secure HTTPS. So if you want a destination that is requested using HTTPS, make sure you enter that in the destination URL yourself.

As ever, if you spot something wrong please give me a shout.

A lot of people have been asking for a Firefox extension for Cligs. Well I have news: there will be many ways through which you can use Cligs with Firefox. Today is the arrival of the first of those ways.

Ubiquity is a Firefox extension that allows you to do really (really!) cool things with Firefox. It’s basically a text box that you type commands into, and you get results. And now Cligs has two Ubiquity commands for you to use:

• cligthis: This command creates a short URL of the page you’re viewing and automatically copies it to the clipboard. This is the fastest way at the moment to get a clig in your clipboard (a faster way is coming tomorrow ).
• cligit: This command creates a clig for any URL you specify. Simply type "cligit http://example.com/" and you will create a clig for example.com. Again, the short URL is automatically copied to the clipboard.

To learn how to use this feature, I’ve created a video for you to watch. It’s embedded below.

And as ever, please get in touch if you have requests or feedback. Thanks!