Category: lncn.eu

Now Linking You to more places

Nick Jackson / / lncn.eu

It’s with great joy that I announce a fix for one of the more niggling little bugs in Linking You, a glitch caused by us failing to correctly encode our own strings when we pass them to be minified. What this meant, put simply, was that we’d ignore anything in a URI after the first ampersand or hash symbol.

This is now no longer the case, and all your URIs which are minified in future will work exactly as expected. A friendly reminder to anybody using the API – please make sure you’re correctly encoding URIs when you pass them as a parameter or things won’t work properly.

On a related heads up for API users (including all end users who are using lncn.eu/api to minify addresses in things like Twitter clients), we will soon be requiring user-specific API keys for these to function. More details next week!

The Roadmap

Nick Jackson / / CWD, Get Satisfaction, Labs, lncn.eu, LUNA, Open Data, Posters, Print From My PC

Just to keep you up to date, here’s what’s planned to be happening on a few projects we’ve got kicking around over the summer. This is in addition to some other big ones we’re working on like Project Jerome (a brand new way of interfacing with the Library systems) and online postgraduate applications.

Authentication

  • Completion of our OAuth 2.0 interface for login.
  • Application Directory to handle issuing of API keys, secrets and tokens.
  • Taking a closer look at seamless SSO.
  • Adding the ability to use University usernames and passwords at Get Satisfaction.

Linking You

  • Administration interface.
  • Even faster.
  • Improved statistics.
  • Link checker (monitors for broken links and notifies accordingly).
  • Support for custom minified keywords.
  • Support for alterable destinations using 307 redirects instead of 301.
  • Improved metadata & thumbnail gathering.
  • Warnings for potentially unsafe or unsuitable destinations (to stop link masking).
  • Support for web hooks.
  • Membership of 301Works.

A-Z

  • Admin interface.
  • Link checker (monitors for broken links and alters lists accordingly).
  • Highlighting of links requiring login.
  • Support for even more export formats (CSV, XBEL and XML) on top of JSON.

LUNA (Network Access for Student Village & Riseholme Park)

  • Updating the design to the CWD.
  • Faster.
  • Removing dependence on JavaScript.

Posters

  • Going live on the production network, ready for its shakedown in the public eye over the summer.

Common Web Design

  • Even more blisteringly fast.
  • Lots of behind-the-scenes goodness to get it looking even better on older browsers and Internet Explorer.
  • Unicorns.
  • Various tweaks and fixes.
  • Custom styling for even more elements of the page so you don’t have to.
  • Moving to a new domain name and production server so we can roll it out to even more sites.

Printing

  • Better compatibility with more operating systems (hopefully).
  • Colour printing support.
  • Integration of Pay For Print, so everything is in one place.

Mini Links – Now with API!

Nick Jackson / / Labs, lncn.eu

As a few people have requested, our magical URL shortening service at http://lncn.eu now comes with a delicious API. It’s directly compatible with the is.gd API, and is so simple that even a monkey could use it (providing the monkey was familiar with the basics of HTTP GET and URL encoding).

Its usage is very simple. All you need to do is call http://lncn.eu/api with the GET parameter ‘longurl’ set to a URL encoded version of the URL you want shrinking. For example:

http://lncn.eu/api?longurl=http%3A%2F%2Fexample.com

The site will then return (in plaintext) the shortened URL, or if you’ve broken it a HTTP 500 error code.

http://lncn.eu/uv

It’s really that easy. More changes are in the pipeline, and as always I am taking requests.