Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why bit.ly is involved at all... basically just to generate a unique short key?

If you implemented your own shout url generation you could just name the image with the short url and stop giving bit.ly that kind of insight into your operation.

Nice way to briefly hit the front page of Hacker News though, and the app looks nice!

View on HN

I'm basically using Bit.ly as a key-value store and short URL generator. The Billr server doesn't maintain a database.

I guess I didn't explain myself clearly... if you shortened the url yourself (I'm sure you can find a good implementation of this), why not name the S3 image exactly the same as the short url?

In the example you gave elsewhere, the image would be http://billr.s3.amazonaws.com/J7W5uY instead of http://billr.s3.amazonaws.com/01C03E08-4CFD-4709-87C9-BB60FD... - so bit.ly wouldn't be needed.

The suggestion elsewhere in this discussion to encode the entire bill in the url is probably the optimal solution though. With a bit of caching it's probably the cheapest you could run your system (sans S3).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com