It’s rather amusing the increase of spam I get to the feedback script on URL.ie. I’ve only pimped the site on boards.ie, and in my personal email sig (not lists). Also, I don’t use any formail (or clone), so I assume that the boards.ie link has bumped up the sites ranking/popularity. Still though, serving 2,000+ URLs doesn’t make it all that popular! I certainly didn’t think anyone would bother to Google the feedback page, or scrape the site, for the purposes of spamming. I certainly thought it’d be down on the list of priority for any scripts out there.

Alas! Shortly, I’ll have more spam per month, than URLs hosted. It doesn’t bother me in the slightest (the feedback script is safe), just it took me bit by surprise. If the site takes off, I’d have expected spam, but it hasn’t (and won’t until I add a bit more value to it!).

Upcoming features:

• Rewrite from scratch (no longer based on the restrictive TightURL script
• Basic statistics reporting, daily totals, user agents, IPs
• Password protection / private URLs
• 302 Permanent redirection (probably default, but certainly an option)
• Graphics to support how it works, for the non-tech users
• Other commercial ideas, which probably won’t ever get done, but if they do, I’ll most likely consider a basic subscription for access to that level of feature.

Some of these are done already, but only locally .. I want to finish the bulk of them before I deploy to the live site. I’ve had a lot of positive feedback, for which I’m grateful, but the RegExs used in TightURL are the main problem (and source of complaint). In fairness, most sample URLs provided are actually invalid. However, there are many high-profile sites using them, so I gotta roll with it!