2 Fat Dads

Today we are announcing the 2FatDads.com ShortURL service, this is the first product or service that 2FatDads has ever launched. And it is very much in pre-beta form right now. In fact this post should be the first link to actually use the service itself, and the only people who will have access to it for the time being are the Fat Dads. If it goes well, we will make it available to all of our readers and listeners.

Original photo by Flckr's sludgeulper

Why are we doing this? We’re not trying to create a “me too” service or even claim any ownership of anyone else’s content. We always give full credit to any source we use and use full links to the original source in our all our posts as well, always striving to avoid any kind of link digging on your behalf.  We use open source technologies like WordPress.org, PHP, MySQL to build the site and try to publish it with other standards compliant protocols like RSS and the media enclosures that allow us to send the DadCasts into  iTunes. Over the years we have bolted on neat-o plug-ins to either modify the format of the site or allow us to use our arsenal of Google Tools like Analytics for web stats and Adsense for serving up the Ads you might see to the left and at the bottom of some of our posts, well that is if you are not if you’re not blocking ads with a browser extension (more on that another time).

All we want to do is make sure our posts and interesting links get to you faster. If we post a new article before lunch, you can bet that we want it to be tweeted twittered in front of your eyes at the same time. And because we’re busy Fat Dads with a bit of a programming background, we HAVE to find some kind of automated service to do this for us. In the beginning we were using some pretty cool services that would use popular shortURL services. But this opened up a few problems along the way, let me explain what the issues are and why you should actually care about this too.

Continue reading Rolling Your Own ShortURL Service