LinkLocker

You may have noticed a few short stretches of downtime recently. These are planned events, as we are working to apply patches and mitigations in response to those nasty Spectre and Meltdown exploits you may have heard about in the news over the past couple of weeks. There is of course no sign of any intrusion related to these attack vectors, be we are taking proactive steps to ensure that we are as prepared for attacks of these sorts as we possibly can be. Rest ...

If you haven't yet heard, the Department of Justice has served a search warrant to hosting provider Dreamhost, in which they demand a massive amount of data about disruptj20.org—a site which helped organize protestors against the President's inauguration in January. These sorts of requests are not at all uncommon, but in this case the DOJ wants info about the site's visitors. What info? Pretty much all info. If you visited that site for any reason, the DOJ wants to know ...

Today we're releasing a public beta of the LinkLocker API. Authentication is handled by a straightforward and standard OAuth 2 implementation. All of the endpoints return easily parsable JSON, covering the full gamut of the service's features.

We believe the API is pretty stable at this point, but please do proceed with caution and lots of testing if you decide to start building some kind of public-facing app. If you should encounter any trouble along the way, please let us know!

Last week Manton Reece and Brent Simmons released a project called JSON Feed, news of which quickly made its way around the part of the Internet populated mainly by software developers. It's a new standard for content syndication on the Web--like RSS, but cleaner. It's a cool idea: XML (on which both RSS and Atom are based) isn't just ugly, it's also really irritating to parse. While it's a new spec and nobody's sure it will ever catch on ...

Our users are the best. To thank you all, today we are instituting a great new way to give your friends a discount toward a new subscription while also getting a discount for yourselves. Any time a new user signs up after visiting the site with your special referral link (which can be found on your new referrals page), both you and your referred user will get a credit for one month's subscription fee added to your accounts.