Cull.us: Branded URL Shortener with Google Analytics, CNAME, and .htaccess

One of the biggest problems with URL shorteners – aside from being needed at all – is it’s not easy to move from one to another without breaking all the previous links. Culld.us hopes to change all that. Use Your Own Domain Name At Culld.us, you get a subdomain – like grv.culld.us – and just …

Culld.Us – URL Shortening Reimagined

We don’t shorten URLs just to shorten them. We shorten them for the same reason big box retailers sell flat-pack furniture – greater confidence during transport. With that in mind, I’ve completely rebuilt Cullect’s URL Shortener1 – http://culld.us It’s still custom brand-able. In a way I’m much happier with than in the previous version – …

RealTimeAds.com Launches at MinnPost.com

I’m pleased to announce the launch of RealTimeAds.com – a advertising product now in beta testing at MinnPost.com Karl and I have been building and testing the system for a couple of months now and I’m quite happy with it on three of fronts; It feels like it makes advertising approachable to people and organizations …

How To Cache Highly Dynamic Data in Rails with Memcache – Part 3

In part 1 and part 2, I laid out my initial approaches on caching and performance in Cullect. While both of them pointed in the right direction, I realized I was caching the wrong stuff in the wrong way. Since then, I tried replicating the database – one db for writes, one for reads. Unfortunately, …

How To Cache Highly Dynamic Data in Rails with Memcache – Part 2

In my part 1, I laid out my initial approach on caching in Cullect. It had some obvious deficiencies; This approach really only sped up the latest 20 (or so items). Fine if those items don’t change frequently (i.e. /important vs /latest) or you only want the first 20 items (not the second 20), The …

Cullect and Why I Built It – UPA-MN Feb 12 ’09 6-8pm @ Open Book

(cross posted @ MNteractive.com & blog.cullect.com) I’ll be talking about how and why I built Cullect.com, Feburary 12th UPA-MN event at the Open Book, 6-8pm (Feels good to be back at the UPA-MN, it’s been too long.) The agenda: Developing a product you will use and the way you will use it. Designing the API …