Two More URL Shortening Services

Yesterday I told you that you can now shorten your URL on niceURL using other services as well. Today I want to emphasize that by telling you that we are supporting two new outside services: Cli.Gs and Kl.am.

That's all for now, but be sure more things are coming up really soon!

When Nice Becomes Nicer

As I was saying yesterday, niceURL is an evolving project. It launched yesterday with nothing more than a page where you would enter the long and ugly URL and get a nice and short one, perfect for sharing on microbloging sites (read Twitter) and other places where keeping it short is a must.

But that was niceURL v0.1 ...

A day has passed and niceURL has grown [ it's v0.2 right now :-) ], becoming even nicer and a lot more useful. And it's pretty easy to see that I'm right when I say this: just head over to the website and look just beneath the huge box where you enter the URL you want to get shortened. You'll see a pink select box. Well, using that select box you can generate short URLs using not just niceURL but other services as well (TinyURL, Bit.Ly and Is.Gd at the moment). And when you are selecting one of the two domains that niceURL is available on (http://nurl.me and http://niceurl.me) you will also be able to create a niceURL with a custom slug, like http://nurl.me/nice which goes to the initial niceURL post here on my blog.

Another nice addition was developed with other developers in mind and that is an API. It was an expected step with a project like this and it helps both the 3rd party developer have access to a URL shortening service and niceURL grow. A win-win situation.

Having said this I urge you to keep an eye open for even more features coming to the project. Really soon.

Making It Short and Nice: niceURL.me

Before I even start talking about niceURL I want to say that YES, I know there are a lot of URL shortening services around. And yes, I know that at first sight there is no point in using it! But please, read on... and at the end you might think the exact opposite!

Having said that, we can move on to the juicy part.

Yes. This is a project I've been developing. And yes, at the moment it is quite primitive. As it just takes a long and/or ugly URL and turns it into a short and much more appealing one. But that's it at the moment. Hmm...wait! Have you looked at the badge next to the logo? No? Than take a look. Do it now, it's right here. I think you got the point!

Now...why would anyone build an URL shortener instead of using one of the many already available? Simple. Because niceURL is not just an URL shortener, at least not for long. Version 0.2 is coming a lot sooner than you think and it brings some much desired functionality. Functionality that you can't find on any other URL shortener and that every power-user wants. And when I say power-user I don't refer to a maniac that wants to shorten URLs all day long. I'm talking about someone that uses a microbloging platform quite often and that wants to be able to post links that are the shortest and look the best. And wants to do it fast and easy!

With all the respect for TinyURL, SnipURL, Bit.ly and many other huge URL shorteners, I hate using them. Their UI and UX suck. TinyURL looks and SnipURL and Bit.ly manage to flood the main page with a lot of non-sense. I don't get why SnipURL calls "Vital stats" the number of URLs they have shortened! That number won't save my life and I can easily live without knowing it. I would be more than happy if they moved it to a separate page if they really feel the need for an ego-boost.

With all this in mind and while, i admit, looking at the Google homepage I realized that is what I missed when it came to URL shorteners! A page with just a logo and a box to "drop" my long and nasty URL in. That's it. That is how niceURL's interface was born. And that is the principle I promise I'll support throughout this whole project.

All in all, today niceURL is a good-looking, super-accessible. But it might be a lot more in a matter of days. You'll just have to keep an eye open!

Oh, almost forgot. One really nice advantage of niceURL is that it makes a plain 301 redirect to your original URL so you will not be losing all that link juice you are getting through the sites where you post the shortened URL! ;-)

Generating an Image's Color Scheme Using Imagick

UPDATE:It seems that the TinyMCE environment I used to edit this post stripped the <pre> I used to wrap the code. Everything should be fine now though!

When I got the idea behing TwitColors the first question I asked myself was "What's the best way to get the colors out of an image?". And since it was the main component for the whole application and it analyzed about 60 full-size images it also had to be fast, since this was only the beginning of the whole analytic process that is behind TwitColors.

This being said I almost instantly eliminated (or `hated` to be more exact) the idea of iterating through all the image's pixels and finding out their color and then using a math formula to "merge" the colors. It could be done but it would take too much time that the app doesn't have. After forgeting about this approach I remembered seeing an interesting function in the Imagick library. That function is Imagick::quantizeImage(). And it does exactly what I neede it to do: it "cuts" the number of colors inside an image to the number you give it. And I wanted 10.

Without any more hustle I'm going to present you with the code I used to extract 10 unique colors from an image:

$im=new Imagick($image);
$im->quantizeImage( 10, Imagick::COLORSPACE_RGB, 0, false, false );
$im->uniqueImageColors();
$it=$im->getPixelIterator();
foreach ($it as $row=>$pixels)
	foreach ($pixels as $column=>$pixel)
		{
		$rgba=$pixel->getColor();
		}

Basically everything it does is to load the image as a new Imagick object, reduce the number of colors in the image to 10 RGB colors (using the Imagick::quantizeImage() function I was talking about earlier), delete all unrequired pixels from the image keeping only one pixel for any unique color (that is what Imagick::uniqueImageColors() does). Up until this point the full-size image has been converted to a tiny image that is 10px wide and 1px high. Now everything that remains to be done is to get the colors of those pixels in a PHP readable format - that is either and HEX value or an RGB array. This is also done with Imagick by creating a new PixelIterator object using the Imagick::getPixelIterator() function and then using a simple loop to go through the matrix of pixels and getting their color using the ImagickPixel::getColor() function that returns an RGBA (red, green, blue, alpha) array of the color.

That's it. Now you can easily get the color scheme of any image without needing any specialized software and straight from your PHP scripts.

TwitColors.com

UPDATE: Great news for designers! TwitColors now allows you to download a certain user's color scheme in .ACO format. You can find the download link below the user's color listing.

A few days ago I made a blog post stating that I'm working on a bunch of projects that I really hope to get online asap. Well, I have a good news for both you and me. One of them is online.

The project I'm talking about now is TwitColors, a new way to explore Twitter from a colorful perspective.

It basically analyzes the Twitter profile image of a given person and brakes it to up to 10 unique colors which are then matched to a database of thousands of already discovered colors and Twitter users and generates it's color scheme as well as tops for the most and least used colors in profile images among different tweeps.

Example color schemes: http://twitcolors.com/encu, http://twitcolors.com/loic

But enough with the talk. Go and check it out at http://twitcolors.com