TimLeland

Yes it is. It’s amazing what you can build online as a solo dev!

I pronounce it “ tee dot el why”. Not sure if that’s better but my thought is it will help people remember the domain. What do you think?

Indie Hackers is what led me down the road of building side projects. For me it was the inspiring interviews from people like Mike the founder of Park.io. How one person can build a business solo is amazing.

Five years into the future, I am now working to grow T.LY URL Shortener to be the best way to create and manage short links. I have a long way to go but I have made a lot of progress in a "short" time.

T.LY URL Shortener https://t.ly/

Park.io Interview https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/034-mike-carson-of-park...

I'm the creator of T.LY URL Shortener and malicious URLs are a constant battle. I decided to take all I've learned around detecting malicious urls and build a simple API using AI to score URLs (0-100) based on hundreds of factors. My goal is to help protect users from malicious links.

Im a big fan of browser extensions as well. They are great side projects that can grow to hundreds of thousands of users. They can be as simple as html and javascript. My most popular extension is a url shortener tool and its grown to over 400k users https://t.ly/extension

Maybe you have heard about Twitter being in the news lately . With Elon’s recent purchase of Twitter and the release of Twitter Blue Verification, there has been a lot of discussion around the “Verification Icon.” In the past, it's always been reserved for those notable in government, news, entertainment, or another designated category. Some users are excited to be verified finally, and some think it will ruin Twitter.

I hacked together a Chrome Extension that swaps out the verification icon with an emoji for users who paid for Twitter Blue. You can choose between multiple emoji icons.

I'm the creator of https://T.LY URL Shortener and am always interested when I see new short link services. My biggest piece of advice is to figure out a way to detect malicious URLs before your service is completely shut down. A month after starting T.LY, my servers were disabled by my hosting company without warning. Since then, I've worked on systems and tools to prevent malicious short links and make the service more reliable.

Most comments I see here are questioning why we still need URL shorteners. Print, media, SMS, and analytics are just a few reasons. I wrote some additional info on my blog: https://timleland.com/are-url-shorteners-useful-today/

Another interesting thought is when you create a TinyURL, it's 20 characters long, and Bitly links are 14 characters long. These services cannot create short links anymore. As a URL shortener grows, the number of actual short links diminishes. Currently, T.LY has over 10 million short links, which means plenty of four and five-character short URLs are available.

Two character URLs 3,844 (62^2) unique combinations

Three character URLs 238,328 (62^3) unique combinations

Four character URLs 14,776,336 (62^4) unique combinations

Five character URLs 916,132,832 (62^5) unique combinations

Six character URLs 56,800,235,584 (62^6) unique combinations

Seven character URLs 3,521,614,606,208 (62^7) unique combinations

Eight character URLs 218,340,105,584,896 (62^8) unique combinations

Check out the URL Shortener T.LY. It's one of the shortest domain that allows you to create short links that I know of.

>> https://t.ly/

I've been running https://T.LY/ and many other sites with Cloudflare. I've never had an issue but if the detect malicious content, they will alert you of the issue. Is it possible you missed the email or it went to spam?

URL Shorteners have always been a big topic on the Hacker News. It seems like every week someone creates a new link shortener service or they post an article on why to use or not to use link shorteners.

With companies like Google, Git, and others deprecating their link shortener services, you may think why do we still need URL shorteners in 2022? From the sheer number of short URLs on the internet from major services like T.LY, it appears for the time being that URL shorteners will be around for years to come.

So do they still serve a purpose? What are your thoughts?

You are in luck I also built a link unshortener :) https://linkunshorten.com/

URL shorteners still serve a purpose for sms, marketing, smart redirects, and more. One of the ways to combat some of the concern around what happens if the service shutdowns is to use your own domain when creating short links. This allows you to export your links since you control the domain.

I've been running https://T.LY URL Shortener for the past 2 years and I'm the creator of the URL Shortener Extension (https://t.ly/extension) that has over 400K users. Let me know if any questions around url shorteners.

I've seen several of these add Reddit to Google post recently. Curious if this could be turned into a real product or just adding reddit to searches is good enough? Adding reddit to searches seams to remove all the spammy seo targeted post that are not helpful.

I built a site that is more like a search engine but uses Google: https://gooreddit.com/

Neat project! URL shorteners are always fun to build and think about scaling. The real challenge is dealing with malicious users. I've spent more time building automated malicious url detection then anything else while building https://t.ly/ Url Shortener.

Haha thanks! I took the simple route that saves a few keystrokes.

Funny I built the same thing a couple weeks ago:

https://gooreddit.com/

The New Google Meet Extension allows you to create new Google Meet rooms with one click of the extension’s icon in the top right of your browser and have the Google Meet link copied to your clipboard. Thanks for checking it out.

Great idea! Sad that these type of things need to exist.

Reddit may not be able to but using Google to search Reddit works great :).

Here is a simple site that you may want to bookmark.

Whenever you start to type goo.. just visit https://gooreddit.com/

Thanks! I can look into adding additional search engines. I've never heard of Startpage.

This site was created as a quick tool to search Reddit using Google. I've been typing this manually for years but this post motivated me to throw together a site to make it a little easier. https://dkb.io/post/google-search-is-dying

Haha no but I like the idea! I have thought about adding several buttons to search multiple sites. What other sites would you like to search?

Haha I made the same type of site: https://gooreddit.com/

Check out this site that will save you a few keystrokes when searching Reddit using Google: https://gooreddit.com/

I've been adding this to my searches for years. Check out this site that will save you a few keystrokes: https://gooreddit.com/

The competitor solitaired.com is doing over 6 millions views a month and has similar ads. My guess is they could be making over 150,000 a month from ads.

SimilarWeb says 342K monthly visitors. Always curious how accurate these tools are.

I wonder if the delay is intentional so users start paying and want to finish. If they saw ads, they may immediately leave. Also ads can slow down a website load times so the delay may be for SEO.

Cool idea I actually added this as a feature to my Weather Extension. I like the idea of being alerted as well. https://weatherextension.com/

If anyone is looking for an alternative URL Shortener you should checkout T.LY

https://t.ly/