In a remarkable turnaround, URL shortening service tr.im was resurrected after having the plug pulled – seemingly for the last time – just a few days ago. The operators, Nambu, cite “popular response, and the countless public and private appeals … received to keep tr.im alive” as the reason for the restoration and intend to “keep tr.im operating going forward, indefinitely”.
Unfortunately, the hard realities of business have caught up with my preferred URL shortener tr.im. The operators, Nambu, feel they are unable to continue funding the service and have also been unable to find a buyer, so they have taken the decision to shut down the service.
I have a number of personal sites that I maintain, three of which (including this site) make use of the Wordpress publishing platform to manage blogs, and all fundamentally powered by PHP. The sites are all hosted on the same low-cost (and therefore low-power) VPS slice that also manages a number of other services for me, so it is therefore important that the PHP web applications operate as efficiently as possible to make best use of the limited resources available.
I have been doing some optimisation work on the Wordpress managed sites recently and decided it was time to trial a PHP cache on the server.
Alex King has updated his very useful Twitter Tools Wordpress plugin to version 2.0. Several exciting new features have been added, not least of which is a separate, supporting plugin to add bit.ly URL shortening to the main plugin out of the box.
I’d written earlier about how to add URL shortening to Twitter Tools, giving example code for tr.im which is my preferred URL shortening service. Fortunately it is straightforward to add the same support to version 2.0 of Twitter Tools. In the previous example I added the new URL shortening functions to the theme’s functions.php file. This time however, in the style of the new Twitter Tools 2.0 bit.ly plugin, I’ll create a whole new tr.im based URL shortening plugin.
For a period of two or three weeks at the start of July 2009 all my sites, including this one, were unavailable. The physical node that hosts the VPS that hosts the sites was wiped out in a mass hack attack perpetrated against the operators, VAServ. All VPS data on the node was destroyed, which unfortunately included my personal email, web content, source code repositories and so on.
