Rate My App: Build Time = 342 Minutes | Hacker News Reader

Rate My App: Build Time = 342 Minutes

17 pointsnick00742 comments

It was a weekend project. How's it feel, what's it missing?

http://qzip.in

How about every second year CS student write a URL shortening service on the web. Then we should have lots of them.

Then, how about every third year CS student write a paper discussing why URL shortening services are a bad thing.

Maybe fourth year CS students could write a program to spider the web looking for broken web links that depended on the (now-defunct) URL shortening services they set up in second year.

Ok, ... sorry to be so snarky.

342 minutes. Nice job.

You "shortened" the time to build a URL shortening service.

I'd say URL shorteners belong in the realm of the "information technology program" department, as my school called it, not CS... but otherwise I agree with you.

You're lucky. My company used to name it "CPU" department.

A friend of mine in college just wrote his own: ze.nu

I was pondering writing one for fun... but now I feel bad.

If you think you'll learn something from it, go ahead and do it.

Thanks for pointing that out. It has been a while since I last built something for fun. Learning is a great motivator.

Fun is a great motivator for learning.

Ugh, I really don't feel like writing a spider...

but if you swallowed a spider then perhaps you'd die.

If you're asking for an opinion from the entrepreneur in me, I'd tell you to go get a job at Starbucks and stay as far away from the Web as possible.

If you're asking for an opinion from the programmer in me, I'd give you a pat on the back and buy you lunch.

Really? I've made a lot more from URL shorteners than someone makes at Starbucks.

People have paid you to create a URL shortener?

I tried to figure out how linkrap.com makes money. At least it doesn't seem to replace Amazon links with affiliate ones, so will you reveal the trick?

A lot of sites use the code behind linkrap(the linkrap.com site itself hasn't been touched in months).

There are a few different business models at work.

From your resume it seems the entrepreneur in you has little experience.

I think a true entrepreneur would be impressed with getting a project finished quickly.

Appearances are deceiving.

Man whoa, where is all this hate coming from? Good job, under 6 hours isn't bad at all. I think it looks great to have launched projects up on the web as part of a resume.

If I had a suggestion it would be to automatically show me the "tracking" stats.

Just what we needed. Another URL shortener.

What's the point?

Why is it a bad thing? It's better to have tons of shortening services, than a few big ones. Just to spread the risk incase one goes down.

If tinyurl.com or bit.ly went down right now, half of the links on Twitter would go dead...

If I'm using a url shortener and worried about my links dying, I'm pretty sure that I trust tinyurl or bit.ly to be around longer than 99% of the url shorteners that have popped up in the last two weeks.

Well, your call on how to spend your time, but if you were willing to bump that up to about 2342 minutes you could have written something people would actually pay for, and you'd get a bit of experience on the non-programming parts of running a business in the bargain.

As to what's it is missing: I'm guessing the anti-spam measures in place are kind of lacking, but I'm not going to exploit it to test.

At first I was not amused by another URL shortener.

Now I respect you for having the guts to post it here. Props to you.

The only thing that you should add is an optional email address input. Now you can contact the people that are using your app. For instance, if you wanted to email everyone after you rolled out a new feature. Like a new feature that enables your app to email the link you just created to yourself. Maybe is sends another email after 10,25,50,100 visits to let you know.

Perhaps it could check if a link has already been added. Also return any qzip URL as itself.

These don't matter a whole lot for a weekend project though.

nice idea... might add that

I would like it to, 1.copy the short-url to clipboard directly. 2.provide a firefox addon to make short urls directly without visitng website.

hey, this one makes it easier to see how many clicks your links is getting. does that count for anything?

Counts that you finished and launched a project. Keep using it, post it anywhere you need to and maybe you get enough users to sell it.

Or, go ahead and try to sell it over and over again to anyone who wants to start a URL service.

Nice job getting it done so quickly. You have any plans/ideas on how to make money with it?

While there are a lot of these services out there already, I think it looks and works great. Especially for doing it in 342 minutes.

Nice job. Simple and functional. Just as good as any of the other shortening services.

Couple points. Bad domain name (IMO) and I'm not entirely sure it'll stay around. Do you plan on keeping it hosted? Someone would need to know you plan on staying online and operational if they were going to post something using it.

Want to post the source?

Great work considering the time. (just judging the website, not whether the need exists for another URL shortner cause the title says "Rate my App", not "Give me your opinion on URL Shortners"). Anyways, can you tell me where you got your .in domain from, I'm looking for a good registrar? Thanks.

godaddy has them available now ($6)

I tried to "shorten" http://qzip.in/ and got http://qzip.in/h4. ;)

I think he has fixed it now. I tried it and it did nothing.

Oh they joy of edge cases... try http://www.com (that is a valid url by the way... points to some crappy parked page so don't bother visiting it).

It was a refreshing sight after going through so many URL shortening websites to find www.aafter.com. The website is the first of its kind in the entire web shortening websites to generate two smaller URLs as you type one lengthy URL in the search box. Either of the smaller URLs could be used to access the website instead of writing the lengthy URL and are quite easy to remember.

Tony Smith

why'd it take you so long? :)

Seriously though, good job, nice clean design, fast performing and seems to work (always important). As for usefulness in a world full of url shortening services I'm more skeptical about, but as a fun/school project its a good job.

heh, I thought you meant compile time.

is a url shortening service the newest "hello wrold i cna rite programm"? sure feels like it.

By the way, what framework/language did you use to develop it ?

Pretty good. The favicon is xampp icon.

342 should have been 60

Reply on news.ycombinator.com