Many sites on one page

Hello Habr!

A good day! Good afternoon! We come from startup brief.ly from London. From our Ukrainian friends, we learned about the mighty Habrahabr community, and decided to present you our revolutionary product at our discretion.

I would like to hear how he behaves in your hands, what is your opinion, what you liked, what not? What would you do differently, and what can be proud of?

Intermezzo

How many Internet address reduction services are truly unknown to anyone. Exactly more than a thousand. Each serious company has its own short domain. Twitter has spawned an entire industry. They differ only in additional functionality. However, they all take one URL and make another URL out of it.

Background

We decided to do something new, it would seem corny obvious. Why not take a lot of links, put everything in tabs, and forward it as one page?



A year ago, our programmers have developed a frame-based theme name.ly/frames , that allows you to upload a lot of resources in Tabah as in the embedded Internet browser. For example, all the sites of the famous Ukrainian and Russian political scientist Vitaliy Portnikov open immediately here: sincere.ly/portnikov - and are also reflected on portnikov.com/sites .



The disadvantage of name.ly was the complexity and duration of the site. It was necessary to register, select a frame template and enter each link separately. It took about five minutes.

Brief.ly

We experimented a lot and came to the conclusion that all ingenious should be done in a matter of seconds. So, based on name.ly, the brief.ly service was born - for instantly creating compilations of many sites.

Site compilation

Brief.ly works as follows: in the text box, you can submit a list of links and a space for each of them. You can simply copy-paste links without signatures, brief.ly on the basis of domain names itself will offer inscriptions and allow them to be edited before creating the compilation itself. In additional options it is possible to download the original page names, it really takes a little time, up to five seconds per link, depending on the speed of a particular resource.

Since all sites are loaded at the same time so as not to overload people and their Internet, we optimally limited the number of tabs to 36. You can get around this by compiling already compiled links, thus creating nested sub-tags.

Short links

As a result of compilation, a page with all the specified links is created. If there is only one link, then everything works as in a classic shortcut. If there are more links, then the corresponding content is loaded in separate tabs.

In addition to this page at brief.ly, the user can select a link from a list of attractive domains, and if the short code is not pleasant, new random codes can be generated.



Brief.ly allows people to express themselves. The mother platform name.ly was created back in 2008. Now it is a set of domains that are read in English as phrases. “Briefly” - means “briefly”, “namely” - “namely”, “sincerely” - “respectfully”, “many at” - “many in”, “links 2 me” - “links to me”, “ that is me ”-“ this is me ”,“ of course ”-“ of course ”,“ what else ”-“ what else? ”,“ where else ”-“ where else? ”,“ who else ”-“ who what else? ” In stock, more than 200 domains of a similar nature. It’s already not exactly known whether this is a joke or true, but they say at one time we were inspired by a series of advertisements of Nespresso with George Clooney: Nespresso.What-El.se?

Phrases do not end there. Name.ly has two more short domains: an asterisk and an arrow. For example, a coffee advertising site operates on the following links:http: //✯.ws/~3NXL or http: //➸.ws/~3NXL .

Control

You can manage and view statistics on the created compilations even after they have been created without registration, provided that you enter the email and password in the third stage of “Manage”. To do this, use either an existing username, or simply specify new details.



To quickly get to the admin panel you only need to add @ after the slash of the main url.

Statistics

Detailed visit statistics are available only to page administrators. By default, only the creator has access to this data. If desired, they can be made public. You can also add the Google Analytics code. To quickly view statistics, you just need to add + after the slash of the main url.

Here are some screenshots from the results page:

API

To create tabs, you don’t even need to go to the brief.ly site itself, you can use the API and insert the necessary sites into frames via a URL request, or Java-Script. More information can be found at brief.ly/api .

If your services have a need for our functionality, write to us, we will be happy to cooperate with other sites. Brief.ly/API allows you to create customized templates, change colors, headers, avatars.

Redirection and editing

What else you need to notice is the ability to redirect links. Say you did a newsletter, and then you wanted to redirect the link - please - anytime, anywhere.

iPad and Homepages

Application brief.ly our users come up with themselves, and each time new. A month ago, we were thanked on Facebook for finally using the brief.ly iPad browser to get tabs, because Apple somehow missed it.

Those who use many browsers in many places use brief.ly to create their own unified home page. Changed in one place - and the changes immediately occurred everywhere.

Nuances

Everything is great, but there are a few buts. Not all sites support insertion through frames. Among popular Russian resources, such restrictions are imposed by Yandex and VKontakte. Pages on Twitter and Last.fm pop up from frames. Brief.ly has already learned to “fight” this. Profiles from Twitter and fan pages on Facebook are converted through their own widgets. Others are simply not inserted into frames, but are served by direct links.

Among the popular sites there are a dozen of these popping up from frames and the service constantly catches them. Although, 99% of the Internet works fine in frames and the service is quite usable for sending your favorite videos or articles.

On brief.lySo far, only an English interface, but it is as simple as borsch. We promise improvements, and even more interesting applications. But this is perhaps the topic for another article.

Feedback

We look forward to your discussions in the comments. Remember to post your creative ideas. The prize winner will receive his personalized polo shirt from London with a personal signature.

PS All links on this article can be opened in frames through one link brief.ly/habr/ .