Tuesday, January 24th, 2012
Great news from the X.vu headquarters!
Today we’re officialy open for private beta sign-ups.
Hurry up to get a chance to test our brand new website…
Sign up right now, go to: http://beta.x.vu
F.A.Q. (Frequently Asked Questions)
What is a private beta?
The private beta gives a limited group of users, early access to our full brand new X.vu website and system. However based upon your feedback some parts of the website might be temporarily blocked from use or changed during the private beta. If you’re selected as one of the lucky ones to get in, you’ll be contacted by email. With your help we’ll be able to get all the bugs out and get everything completely finished up before we go public.
What happens with my data after the private beta?
Any short urls or other data created during the private beta remain yours to keep.
Are there any restrictions to sign-up?
No! It’s doesn’t matter where you’re from, how old you are or what your gender is. Anyone can sign up!
Is my e-mail address safe with you?
Of course! We hate spam as much as you do! You can be rest assured, we’ll only email you if you get in the private beta.
To stay updated about events surrounding the private beta we suggest you follow the X.vu team on Twitter and like us on Facebook!
Friday, September 2nd, 2011
Even though we’re working on a brand new website, we decided to take a little of our time to update the current system.
Most of you will have noticed the design changes we implemented to X.vu recently.
In order to have a more streamlined design and soon transition to the brand new X.vu platform, we’ve made the following changes:
- Highly improved HTML, CSS and PHP code
- Fixed multiple minor bugs
- Newly designed buttons
- Added styling to the shorten long URL module
- Added styling to error alerts
- Better styling on Short URL module
- Directly share short URL: Now on Twitter, Facebook and MySpace!
- Added Facebook Like, Twitter Follow and Google +1 buttons to the footer
- Removed Bookmarklet and Widget menu items (both didn’t work properly anymore)
We hope you enjoy our little update, follow our team on Twitter and like us on Facebook for the latest news and sneak peaks!
Thursday, September 1st, 2011
First of all we would like to apologize for the long-time without news updates. We’ve decided to create a Twitter account and a Facebook Fanpage. Through these social networks, we’ll tweet and post updates more frequently. Major news items will of course still be posted on the official X.vu blog.
The last couple of months our dedicated team has been busy working on a brand new X.vu website. We’re excited to let you know the design is at it’s final stages and the development is progressing quickly.
Some of the features you may expect in the upcoming X.vu platform include:
- Advanced shortening options (including password protection, qr codes and more..)
- Easy URL sharing
- High speed ad-free redirections
- URL preview option
- User accounts (finally!)
- Detailed URL analytics
- URL export option
- Improved Anti-Spam system (we’ll post a detailed blog post about it in the near future)
- All new user interface for improved usability
- …Lot’s more and even a couple of exclusive new features but we can’t give away what they are just yet!
Keep an eye on our blog and social networks to find out exactly what we’ve got up our sleeve! We’ve listened to our users and the uservoice page is still available to request features or leave us a comment, so tell us want you want!
Sunday, August 15th, 2010
As part of our ongoing improvements to the service we have today implemented UTF-8 language encoding which enables us to correctly handle URL’s and tags submitted in languages with symbols not in the original universal ASCII language encoding. All pages have also been set to UTF-8 to enable browsers to correctly render these symbols.
For those reading this wondering what all of these weird terms are; UTF-8, Unicode, ASCII; its all related to characters in words. When the first computers with keyboards were created there was not an immediate need to cater for foreign languages and so for many years the set of characters a computer uses had been limited to the standard English alphabet and numbers. However with more and more international Internet users this has obviously become a big obstacle in communicating via computers. Unicode (and within that UTF-8) is a standard that consists of thousands of different characters and how to display them.
Unfortunately we haven’t gotten around to translating the site to other languages as of yet and it may take a while to do this properly however its definetely on our “to-do” list!
Friday, August 13th, 2010
We’ve been working hard over the past weeks preparing and designing a brand new system for what will be the world’s premier URL-shortener tool. However we haven’t failed to recognise that whilst we’re busy in the workshops crafting a new platform we have loyal users still using the existing system; so we’ve been working hard and have implemented some great new features (mostly behind the scenes) to speed up redirections and the site in general:
- A dedicated site server with caching to ensure the site can be as fast as it possibly can be!
- Database server tuning to speed up redirections and to prepare URL’s for the move to our new server of choice, Mongo .
- Improved spam filtering, at the moment many users are having to enter CAPTCHA’s on every submission, this however will be removed as soon as we get the filter just right!
If you have any other site feedback don’t hesitate to leave us a comment or click here to leave some on our uservoice page and get your idea voted up by other users!
Tuesday, August 10th, 2010
We’re still tinkering away with our blog making it just right and getting some great release information prepared for your viewing pleasure! Stay tuned!
