Somewhat amusingly, I got multiple requests for a test API in the last few days. Why the sudden interest is beyond me, but I’m always happy to oblige. So please meet the new test API for clig creation.

To use it, simply add test=1 in query string variables of your API call. For example:

/api/v2/cligs/create?url=a&appid=b&key=c&output=d&test=1

If successful, the API will not save the clig but will return a valid clig. Also, the HTTP header returned is 202 Accepted, not the usual 200 for success.

To reiterate, even if you provide an API key, no clig will actually be created and no clig will be saved. You’ll just get back a randomly-created clig that will return a 404.

This test function is available only in V2 of the API, not version 1.

Update: Joe Dolson caught a typo. The query string variable is appid not app. This has not (and will not) change!

You may have noticed new features are being added at a slower pace lately. Reason is that I’ve been thinking about the next iteration of Cligs and been doing some prelimenary research to see which option is best.

Well now I’ve made a decision about how to restructure the service. The restructuring will be mostly transparent but will allow Cligs to grow in three ways:

• Handle more traffic with less downtime. Cligs has gone offline for a few minutes occasionally and the new system will be better at handling more traffic more efficiently.
• New analytics. Cligs users love data and graphs - surprise! - and the new Cligs will be built to let me roll out new analytics. This is a long term goal and again, one that will continue to evolve.
• New services. In a nutshell, short URLs is just the starting point of a set of a tools I think are missing from our online marketing toolkits

So what does this mean for you, the user? There are three answers:

• Short term (next few weeks): Nothing is changing.
• The switch: There will come a point when Cligs will move to the new system. I don’t have an exact plan yet, but no doubt there will be some kind of disruption that I will keep to a minimum. Leading up to the switch, I’ll post the plan publicly.
• Long term: It’s only going to get better! I hope you stick around!

That’s it for now. If you have questions, post them in the comments below or contact me directly.

When you share a clig on Twitter using Cligs, you get the traffic data for that link. But imagine you share a link to your website, and you get the traffic and you would like to understand what what the traffic is doing on your site. In short, can you integrate Cligs with your website’s analytics?

Well if you’re using Google Analytics, now you can. Joost de Valk has created a PHP script, called Twitter Analytics that does the following:

• You feed it a URL and appends commands that help Google Analytics track the traffic to that URL.
• It shortens this modified URL with Cligs.
• It sends you to Twitter with the shortened URL in hand.

What this means is that now you have two integrated sets of data: Cligs giving you the clickthrough traffic and Google Analytics that tells you what this traffic is doing when it gets to your site. Is that neat or what?

More details about the script and how to get it from the Twitter Analytics home page.

Last night, I went through the ritual that every web developer has to go through and fixed all issues with IE. It was mostly minor things, but some users were reporting a major issue of not being able to log in. Every single other browser, and I test in Firefox, Safari and Google Chrome, was fine. Go figure.

This morning I got confirmations from the users who were having these issues that everything is fixed. That’s not to say everything is fixed because I’m sure there are still more bug lurking in that pile of rubbish that Microsoft has produced for us they call Internet Explorer.

Please let me know if spot any other issues. And thank you to all the users and testers for their help and patience in troubleshooting these problems.

I’ve received some reports of problems with Internet Explorer. Very annoyingly, all other browsers are working just fine.

I’m investigating the issues and will fix them shortly. Menwhile, if you do see a problem, let me know as much detail as possible as it might help me find the problem faster. Fastest thing is to use this contact form. Thanks!

Over the past few days, in the middle of my night in the UK, the Cligs server has seen some unusually high spikes in loading time. On some days you may have noticed a little slowness, and some others, like the night that just passed, some people reported time outs.

Digging deeper, it seems that an old slow friend I’ve mentioned before is the culprit: the "Cligs Getting Last 100 Hits" section in the My Cligs page. It seems there are a few users with large accounts that tend to check around that time.

When these large accounts are checked at the same time, a somewhat slow loading page is multiplied over many users and the server slows down massively.

This is made worse is that now the My Cligs page is the first page people see when the log in, which again multiplies a slow page by many users.

Temporary fix: I’ve completely disabled the "Cligs Getting Last 100 Hits" section in the My Cligs page. The page now loads at breakneck speed, which is the immediate objective.

Note you can still search your cligs for your old cligs, or view them in List View.

Long term fix: Just like I disabled the bot analytics and brought them back, I will figure out a way to bring back the latest hits section in a server-efficient way. No promises on the time line, but the weekend is close which gives me some free time to tinker.

Growing pains like this are to be expected, and the important thing is to make sure the service adapts and problems are fixed quickly.

Check out this screenshot:

See those little clipboards? Click on them to copy to your clipboard the text right next to them. You can copy the clig itself, the clig as an HTML link, and the clig HTML with a title atribute - i.e. every single embed code available right now.

The functionality is built using Adobe Flash, and works in Flash 10. It uses the Open Source library called Zero Clipboard which was pointed out to me by a Cligs user Garrett W (thanks man!).

I’d also like to thank Joe who created Zero Clipboard for his supremely quick diagnosis of a problem I was having while implementing this functionality and updating the library overnight to fix it. Thanks Joe!

By popular demand, just like Cligs makes it easy to post to Twitter, Cligs now helps you post to identi.ca. The following image says it all:

The posting link is found when you create a new clig and in the clig details and clig editing pages.

The Cligs Firefox support has been updated. Details:

Improved Ubiquity Support

Cligs always had two Ubiquity commands support: commands tied to your Cligs account, and public commands that are not tied to any accounts. Recently, a new version of Ubiquity was released and the public commands stopped working. Not only that, Cligs users were using the public commands thinking they’re tied to their account, which is not ideal.

Now this situation is resolved: No more public Ubiquity commands. To get to your Ubiquity commands, go to your API Keys page and choose an API key (or create a new one) and click on the Info icon. This loads the key’s information page which has Ubiquity commands embedded tied to that API key and thus your account. Ubiquity will auto-detect the commands on the page.

Improved Usability of UrlbarExt Integration

As you know, Cligs is supported by the UrlbarExt Firefox addon. Problem was that to tie the Cligs support to your Cligs account required manual editing of the API setting in UrlbarExt. This was an error prone and tedious process and I’ve just made it simpler. In any API key information page, you’ll see a URL you can copy and paste directly into the UrlbarExt Cligs settings without any manual editing. The image below shows you what to copy to where:

Let me know if anything is not working for you.

Two minor tweaks that fix two usability issues:

• When you log in, you are now forwarded to the My Cligs page instead of your control panel. Most of the time when you log in, it’s because you want to see your analytics and now you do.
• When you rename a clig, now it just forwards you to the new clig’s editing page. Previously, Cligs would show you a confirmation message and you have to click a link to continue. No more. Now if the rename is successful, it just takes you to the new clig. If there is an error, it takes you back showing an error message.

Anything else bothering you? Any niggles or wishes you want to see fixed? Let me know!