Jobping Url Shortener – Version 0.6

We have just checked in our latest version of the Jobping Url Shortener, version 0.6. This version resolves an important issue raised by @nato24. Nato24 asked “Have you guys implemented a solution for obscenities in your short url encoder?” . Thanks nato24 & Good question!

Our short urls are too short at the moment to create any four letter words(yet!) but it was just a matter of time before all possible 4 letter words were used.

So, in this release we have decided to remove all vowels (‘a’, ‘e’, ‘i’, ‘o’, ‘u’, ‘A’, ‘E’, ‘I’," ‘O’, ‘U’) from the possible letters used in the Url shortener. This means that our urls will grow a little faster but we were willing to sacrifice this for wordless urls.

However, we do get a major benefit also, we can now make our own short urls using words (that contain vowels). So we are free to make up short urls like http://jobp.in/example and know that the shortener will never create a clashing url because it contains a vowel (or 3).

We also added a feature that allows us to offset the urls generated. By adding this offset into the configuration we allowed our url shortener to skip over any duplicates that would have been created if we just removed the vowels from our code.

The new version is on codeplex here: http://jpurlshortener.codeplex.com/

The production site for our shortener is here: http://jobp.in/

Also be sure to visit Jobping, which is now Global and advertises positions based on Microsoft Technologies.