Introducing Hu.la – our new URL shortener

• May 24th, 2010 /
•  Chris Schultz

I am excited to introduce Voodoo’s latest project, Hu.la, a URL shortener.  If you’re reading this post, you probably got here via a tweet or Facebook post via a short link.  While largely a commodity now, we decided to get in on the action too.  We secured this domain name earlier this year, and decided to launch our own URL shortner.  We’ve been using it internally for a couple months and now are rolling it out publicly so you can too.

One of the fun things about having the great engineering talent at Flatsourcing is being able to pursue projects like this, and occasionally they require a few hacks.  So, we want to share the story of how we built Hu.la:

• bit.ly is the leader in the URL shortner space and we applied to and were accepted in the beta of their bitly.pro program.
• The bitly.pro service powers New York Times, Amazon and TechCrunch’s own URL shorterns too.  You can sign up here.
• In order to get a homepage that allows others to access the service, we took a lesson from the guys who created 511cc.org using bitly.pro.
• And voila: we’ve launched Hu.la – take your links for a spin today.

Any questions or suggestions, please let us know.  We’d love your feedback and for you to make it your default URL shortening service.

• categories: Flatsourcing /
• tags: bit.ly, hu.la