The Qik Blog

Dreamhost Nightmare!

Sheth — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 09:52:13 +0000

We are hosted on Dreamhost PS (private server). On 24th July 2009 we were not able to FTP to the server. We contacted support and waited patiently for a reply. Some how the user associated with the domain was moved to regular hosting and there was no way of reverting it back. For a week mails kept flowing from both ends trying to restore access but no luck. The final solution was create a new user and associate it which meant i would have to again ask everyone working on the site to change their settings.

So the Dreamhost team created the new user and associated it with the domain and in the process updated a month old website! I tried the Restore option but its 4 days and i havent seen the backup anywhere. Also they have not yet been able to figure out how did this happen. They have no system to track this?

Since we could not FTP we were helpless to see some of the bugs and upgrades not actioned immediately. Our api’s were hit in this caos as they were not updated with the new patches.

We have finally managed to salvage most of the work through our backups. But the experience has left us bitter. We shall be looking for a new hosting partner soon. Any recommendation is welcome.

Some of the features we are looking for in the new host apart from it giving us the flexibility to scale

1) Memcache

2) Our choice of Web server (lighttpd, nginx…)

We thank Blogadda who have been supportive and continue to use our service.

Also thanks to Jason Y from Dreamhost whose been helping us out sorting this caos.

Stats are up!

Qik Team — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 06:44:25 +0000

It took us a while to get this working right but we are good to go. The all new statistics page is now live [You need to be logged in to access stats]. Apart from drastically upgrading the design, we have added graphs and more meta data for each URL which is shortened. So now you can get

Date wise hits
Browser used
Referrals

So why did it take us time? We tried lot of flash graph modules before we settled on “Open Flash Chart“. Its Free, Fast and easy to implement.

The only issue we are facing currently is the thumbnail snapshots of the websites… we are hoping to get that fixed asap…

If there is anything else you guys think we need to add Please shoot us a mail…

Cheers.

Enough is Enough. Here we go… Shorten, Bookmark, Share!

The Boss — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 07:35:54 +0000

HTML has been our pain point for a while now. Designs been ready for a while but slicing them has been taking ages. With every delay at our end we see some new url shortening service come up. Its been a nightmare.

Yesterday we went live with our new registration page and the new text page. There are still a few bugs but we will take care of it on the fly now.

So whats new with the text page? for one people can give in their comments. we will activate rating in a day or two. Plus you can share it on your fav social network right from this page.

Also we have a new tag line courtesy Dre.

Shorten, Bookmark, Share!

We have also reworked on the logo a bit. It will start featuring on the older pages soon.

We will be going live with our Bar by this weekend… and the new homepage in a couple of more days… till then send some feedback.

Cheers

Where is the beta?

Sheth — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 13:52:58 +0000

Its been a while since i have updated this blog.

Work has been going on at furious pace. We have shown the product to a couple of our friends and got tons of feedback on the UI, Functionality and ofcourse the bugs.

We have completely revamped the UI. Designs are ready for slicing. We have added a few more functionality some of which we “think” is unique and will be beneficial.

So when do we launch the beta? Well thats a good question Hopefully in 2 weeks time it should be out.

In the meantime do use our bookmarklets available in the footer. One of my favorite is qik tweet, Which not only shortens the url but also posts it to Twitter along with title.

We are now on Twitter at http://twitter.com/qikli

Blogadda our partner have been using the service for a couple of months. You can follow them on http://twitter.com/blogadda

Cheers.

qik Update

Sheth — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 12:15:54 +0000

It seems everyone wants to come up with their URL shortner service. We have made substansial progress with our testing. Were able to patch some bugs.

Our main issue now is scalability and performance. Currently we are hosted at DreamHost but i am not at all confident about it. Looking at different options from SliceHost to AWS Simple DB.

We have finally moved the application to the qik.li domain. Cant wait to launch this.

Cheers!

Alpha Release

Qik Team — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 09:57:45 +0000

We had the engine to run qik.li ready way back in Dec 2008. We been constantly tweaking it and also re coded the entire app.

qik.li is the only site which will allow you to

Shorten a URL
Shorten Multiple URL’s at one go
Allow you to use as a text store
Share it via email/twitter
Bookmarklets { do try our qik+twitter BM }
API
Statistics { pretty rudimentary as of now }

There are a couple of features which we will release when we go Beta…

Another good news for us, well we are lucky to have Blogadda on board who are keen to use this service sign up for testing and integration.

Till next update

Cheers!

The Qik.li Logo makes it debut

Sheth — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 09:41:30 +0000

Wow we managed to get the logo done!

The Final Version of the qik.li Logo

The designs are ready but we need some changes.

Cheers!

Qik.Li Design Process

Dr Dre — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 08:46:13 +0000

qik.li has been in the work for a long time. Having gone through countless revisions, the biggest hurdle was coming up with the name. The first name was Twurrl.in which I loved a lot but once we got hold of Qik.li it was perfect. The very name itself reminded me of chinese names, and suddenly of chinese takeaway, the same cool cute boxes that they have for quick takeaways hence the first layout. Quick Link Takeaway, chinese style.

However as we planned and planned, the vision of qik.li grew and grew faster than we could actually churn out layouts. Finally ditching the graphics heavy takeaway concept with a heavy heart we finally worked and narrowed it down to this v.1.0. The use of odd colours, and strong styles sort of worked in a way. Being 1.0 we still werent satisfied. Rest assured you should be seeing version 2.0 in the next few weeks. Completely redone and restyled.

The Beginning.

Sheth — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 09:21:13 +0000

Dre [aka Andre] and me have been discussing tons of ideas for the past couple of years. Some have seen the light of the day and some have not. When I decided to make all in one { Tumblr/Tinyurl/Linkbunch/TxtBin } application Dre was on to it. We registered a domain twurrl.in for the same in August 2008 and Dr Dre worked on the designs which looked pretty promising.

The idea was to allow a person to put in any type of content and get a short URL for the same and ability to push it to Twitter. Yeah we wanted to cash in on the Twitter wave.

Somehow the application specification sheet went beyond what was intended, so we decided to make it simple and be just another URL shortener but combining Tinyurl/Linkbunch/TxtBin all into one.

The search for the perfect domain name for the same started of. We spent close to 4 months before we hit a jackpot! First choice was Qik.ly but thanks to me being lazy we lost it… but luckily we were able to buy qik.li a couple of days back { Jan 15th 2009 }!

Dre and me again are going to go back to the drawing board and see what we come up with before he disappears for his wedding.

Cheers!

Hello world!

The Boss — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 18:08:40 +0000

Welcome to WordPress and Welcome to Qik.li