NEWS
====

It's been about two years since I did any serious work on TightURL.  Now, due
to abuse of the public TightURL installation at tighturl.com, I've been forced
tp make some changes.  As a result, I've ripped TightURL apart, tried to make
it easier for people to re-use parts of TightURL, tried to make it easier to
maintain.  TightURL has been separated into two parts, an example front-end
Web service that you can use to run your own TightURL service (this is the
very one used at http://tighturl.com) and a library of routines you can use
to implement a TightURL-compatible URL shortening service inside of some other
front-end Web application.  A minmalist tighturl.api.example.php is provided
to show how to create your own front-end Web API service using the TightURL
library.

Updates:
--------
Updates should be easier from now on, whether you simply operate a
TightURL service using unchanged TightURL code, or if you use TightURL
code in your own application.

An original design goal of TightURL was for you to be able to operate a
TightURL service by uploading one single file, tighturl.php .  This was
never a recommended usage, but if you had the file, you had everything
required to run TightURL.  This ended up not working out quite right
because you still needed template files.  What remained true was that you
could easily figure out what you needed to put in a template, so long as you
had tighturl.php .  At this time, I've decided to break TightURL into
several pieces:

tighturl.php              - Implements Squisher, the reference implementation
                            of a TightURL front end that handles interacting
                            with users, displays templates.
                            
tighturl.lib.inc.php      - TightURL library.  Contains the code to add URIs
                            to a TightURL installation, and the anti-abuse
                            code.
                            
Finally...

TightURL was written because I couldn't find a _simple_, Open Source,
host-it-yourself, PHP-based redirection service.  By "simple", I was
hoping to find soemthing that was a redirector, and only a redirector.
I didn't want click-counting, accounts, link-editing, or lots of extra
features.  Upon reflection and the experience of dealing with a lot of
abuse over the first four years of TightURL, I've come to view "simple"
as conforming to a certain strict set of features, rather than the program
code itself being simple, because at over 1000 lines, a PHP script can no
longer be called simple.

Three years since its release, I am still the only developer.  I have
gotten almost no feedback from TightURL users, though I know there are
actually quite a few of you out there.  As a result, since TightURL
suits my needs, and because I can only assume everyone's happy with the
current feature set, I do not expect to add any new features to TightURL in
the future.  Updates to the anti-abuse code will continue to be released as
long as I continue to operate the public TightURL service at
http://tighturl.com .