http://www.adjix.com has figured out the solution to bit-rot with url-shorteners. They have all of the standard stuff with regards to the normal url-shorteners, but they do one thing interesting. They allow for the user to back up their shortened url links to an amazon S3 bucket. What does this do? It allows you to OWN your shortened links! Yea, I set up a CNAME of url.badcheese.com to point to my amazon S3 bucket, gave adjix permission to write to my bucket and now when I make a shortened url, it fetches an actual file off of S3 and does the redirect through javascript. Why would someone like to own their shortened urls? Well, bit-rot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_rot is a problem with url-shorteners. If a url-shortener goes away, your tweets, IMs and all of your content looses a LOT of meaning. Take for example, the tweet: “Check this out: http://tinyurl.com/xxxx”. Meaningless without the following page, right? If I own my own shortened urls, then I can take those shortened urls and move them around from machine to machine and do whatever I want to with them. I know that they’ll always be there because I own them, and if I want to remove one, I just nuke it. Simple enough!

Anyway, hats off to the guys at http://www.adjix.com , also - I sent in a bug report last night at 11:30pm MT, and they answered and fixed the bug by the time I got up in the morning, so they’re midnight hacker types and could really be onto something! I’m a big fan already.

Google Stock Chart on Google Finance: http://url.badcheese.com/57m5

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