I just put the finishing touches on a beta version of Ta.gg. Ta.gg is a short URL service that takes long URLs and turns them into short URLs.

I choose the domain because it is the shortest domain I could find when spelled on a standard cell phone key pad. On my Razr, spelling ta.gg takes only 5 keystrokes (82144). Other services take many more keystrokes to spell. For example, TinyURL.com takes 24 keystrokes to spell.

I also added functionality so that you can add keyword tags to your Ta.gg which should make it easy to find interesting links.

I made a bunch of short cuts people can play with:

• Google search – http://ta.gg/g
• Yahoo – http://ta.gg/y
• YouTube – http://ta.gg/u
• Myspace – http://ta.gg/m
• Facebook – http://ta.gg/f
• Bebo – http://ta.gg/b
• Digg – http://ta.gg/d
• eBay – http://ta.gg/e
• Target – http://ta.gg/ta
• Walmart – http://ta.gg/wa
• Amazon – http://ta.gg/a
• CNN – http://ta.gg/c
• Wall Street Journal – http://ta.gg/j
• Wikipedia – http://ta.gg/w
• Digital Podcast – http://ta.gg/dp

And a bookmark tool to make it easy to make Ta.ggs. Simply add the link below to your browser favorites/bookmarks:
Ta.gg It!
and click it everytime you stumble across a URL you need to Ta.gg.

It’s built on Rails, so it will be interesting to see how it scales.

If you give it a try, let me know what you think.

So we learn that Rails is not perfect when we try to do a major re-write.
The guys over at cd-baby had been held out as an example of Rails being used as a major site re-write. Unfortunately for Rails and maybe good for us regular hackers they have thrown in the towel on Rails and gone back to PHP.

In 7 reasons I switched back to php, Derek Silvers of CD-baby describes why he went back to PHP and what he learned from Rails.

I know some of the pain since I am still in the middle of a re-write that is taking years. I think in my case it’s more about trying to replace perfectly good code with something I hope will be more flexible.

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