Welcome back to the Laravel news creator series today We're joined by Tim Leland who is the creator of T.ly which is a URL shortening service. That's my had been in business for a while now, but uh Tim welcome to the show and you know, let me know if I've missed anything there in that little intro No, that's that's a pretty good. Thanks for having me. Glad to be here sweet sweet. Yeah, so you've I'm trying to think now you've been in
Laravel for quite a while, right? You got started back in the early days yeah, so you know graduated college computer science degree kind of with that standard route and You know worked a software development job doing that and IT type stuff and then started building Websites on the side so I built some like local businesses websites and I started just you know trying to figure out what can I use to you know build a site and I Studdled upon Jeffrey way and you know, Lara cast but he was
doing I think it was net tuts Code igniter tutorials way back maybe like 2013 2012 and I watched like everything he put out and then He kind of switched over to Laravel and that's when I kind of followed him and just you know Watched everything on Lara cast that he put out and just pretty much learned it from from him I kind of give him credit for teaching me a lot of the my early, you know coding styles and Get me into Laravel and then you know, I'm kind of
grateful for that because it I would say, you know, obviously if you're watching this, you know, Laravel saves you a ton of time and all the advantages of it, so You know, I took advantage of all that Laravel had to offer back in 2014
That's awesome. Yeah. Yeah, he was you know back in those days It was like there was not a whole lot of like really good training material out or anything and he sort of brought everybody on board It was sort of it was it was really amazing what he was able to do and accomplish and then you know going from that Net tuts over to you know creating Lara cast and now it's kind of the de facto training resource for all kinds of stuff so it's it's That's one of the big reasons I think
Laravel grew in the beginning was because of him that was awesome Yeah, he just made it really easy to learn So I mean, you know obviously going through school you learn some things but then when you start actually doing it in the real world how to get a you know website hosted and You know, I was early like Laravel Laravel Forge user So I've been I was actually looking at that a couple weeks ago and I think I signed up in like 2014 I don't I don't know when it was started,
but you know, I've been using that to host sites and just building side projects learning Trying to learn how to you know grow a website or an app or whatever. It's a marketing type stuff Just that's kind of been my my journey That's awesome. Well, so speaking of your product is T. L. Y and How did that come about like you just like one day woke up and be like hey I want to make a URL shorter or was there like something that driven you to create this Yeah, so
You know a lot of developers. It's even like a coding, you know challenge that they do for like software in software Interviews, so they'll say hey, how would you design?
You know a link shortener so it's it's kind of like a classic computer science The software developer project that people always like to build but what got me started was a company I was working for they needed an application for like online giving and it was going to be through text messages so they wanted to build a you know, send it a link and In doing that the link the URL had to have some encoding in it and some special stuff to kind of like log them in behind the scenes, so
They wanted a way to send that but the URL so long so that led to well We need a URL shorter and we looked at you know, some of the options out there and decided well, you know We could just build our own Use our own, you know short domain and I think I built like a very simple version and you know Maybe over a weekend pretty much. It was
it was a few days. So Built that you know kind of saw, you know, we we found value in it and then fast forward I think that maybe was like 2016 2017 but fast forward Google kind of announced that they were shutting down their free URL shortener and that kind of prompted me to
Build initially a browser extension. So I didn't really plan to build my own service but I was building browser extensions for like Chrome and Firefox and It's just like a side project so I built a link shortener extension and what it did is it used all these other services so like bit.ly tiny URL in a bunch of other free ones and Yeah, so that was kind of where I got so I saw that, you know businesses needed it Built the extension because Google announced they were shutting down their
service and then the extension grew just because You know people were looking for alternatives once Google kind of shut their service down
Gotcha, yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, so I've actually been using it man for a few months now My use case was you know, we send out newsletters and then if we have sponsors then they're like well You know, can you give me you know stats on all my links in your newsletter and I'm like Yeah, that's always annoying because then I have to go to the newsletter software and like pull up You know that that campaign and and then just try to figure out how many people clicked and all that stuff
So I was like, well, there's got to be an easier way and then so I signed up and now I use the short The T to a while links in the newsletter and then I can share the stats You know from your website over to the sponsor and they can just look at everything and see see, you know How many clicks it got and all the other stuff so that's it's been really really handy for me Just you know having that simple simple way of you know, making everybody happy. So I really like the
service. I think it's awesome
That's awesome. Yeah, it's always great hearing you know people using it You know if you do a lot of support Usually only here like the negative stuff and the problems but it's nice always nice hearing the positives And that's a great use case because it's not really you don't really need the links to be like short And that's what people usually think like, you know, obviously You know short link is called a URL shorter But it's also great for if you just need something to you know
Track engagement and like alright how many people are clicking on links and need that basic information versus like having to spin up your own software on your back end to track clicks and You know if you just want something quick to track that and it's really useful For sure for sure You know, so I you know, everybody thinks I know I'm probably the same way is like oh, well, you know We're just mapping two fields in the database or whatever but it's there there's way more to it
right behind the scenes like you have I Assume you have to have like tons of like spam tracking and all this other stuff. Is that sort of accurate?
It's it's like way more involved than you think Yeah, so initially I built so I built the extension this like link shortener extra URL shortener extension and It implemented it just used API's so that was the very first version of the product was just an API create a short link And then on the actual like domain T dial why it would just redirect I didn't have like logins or you know, any kind of interface But then yeah as soon as you you know that so that part is what most people
think of just you know In a data base you have one table that just stores, you know long URL short URL and redirect but yeah as soon as you get analytics and then You know just trying to like scale some of that stuff and you get one URL that kind of blows up and gets tons Of traffic you still got to you know Track all that you can't just you know, cash it or something like that You got to know that you know where the users are coming from and how to scale
that so it gets more complicated for sure and then like you said the spam thing, you know, there's definitely a lot of that a lot of automated bots and You know, you got a build-in detection for that type of stuff Yeah that sort of reminds me of Just me personally cuz so to give everybody a little backstory so I added some of the short links to the website and just for some of the sponsors that we have and They were getting just tons of clicks and it was like this is a lot, you know
So I emailed Tim and I was like, you know, what's going on here? And he's like you got you've got a thing
hitting it. It was like certain IPs So then I went to cloud flare and it was like sure enough It was like cloud flare was not blocking, you know, these three IPs that were just like, you know hitting my server so hard So that I just create a firewall rule block those and now everything's back to normal and like You know, I'm not getting hit hit by all the Stuff anymore So, you know all that stuff's super useful to have and to be able to you know Track it down the way you you were you're
able to use, you know using your service Yeah, so that's it. That's good to know. So you were able to find that out Mm-hmm, and they were hitting layer of L news directly. So they were hitting your service and then like scanning all the links on there Yeah. Yeah, it was almost like a like a scraper bot type thing Yeah, and so yeah, and then I was able to block those and just the request just went, you know way down
Which is interesting. I mean they wouldn't actually I guess they weren't using JavaScript so they weren't making it to my analytics So they're only coming in through I can only see them in cloud flare itself. Not through my own
You know site analytics. So that was kind of interesting Yeah, cloud flare is that's a whole nother piece we can get into but like what cloud flare does and you know, I definitely use them but you know their DDoS protection and just all of their automated stuff to Protect your site as soon as you get a site that Gets enough traffic. It's just like a constant target for DDoS attacks or
You know just automated scraping tools. I think I had one time some Automated bot I just had crazy analytics logs that were just like well, this isn't normal. What's going on? ended up being some bot was scraping every single short URL in my system and just non-stop just hammering my servers and There's a lot of stories like that that you know, you got malicious people and then you got people that are just you know doing who knows what and a Lot of times it's in all these other
countries. You're like, all right, what's going on in Russia or something like that? Yeah, yeah that yeah that part's crazy and well even the DDoS stuff is like, you know, my website's Laravel news It's like it's just a news website Why you know and then one morning I wake up in club where it's like you had a DDoS attack We have you know automatic automatically mitigated this and I'm like, why would somebody try to DDoS me? Like what? It's just crazy Yeah. Yeah, I I don't understand it, but
it's a problem. I'd be curious to hear from other other people I you know, I see it every once in a while, but I guess you know, that's cloudflare is Pretty valuable in that you know to help stop it. They do a pretty good job with just detecting it But then you know, you got to you know customize and do
different things to prevent it. I Could go down a whole rabbit hole of that Some of the stuff I've had to do For sure So are you you're still hosting it or using Forge to provision and do everything for the for the service or I know I still So I still use Forge. I wish I knew About Laravel cloud about six months ago. I don't know when So what I was running into is I was adding servers and then you know as you know I'd start getting more and more traffic.
I was just manually provision servers which work fine But I got to a point where I was like, okay Let me see what I can do and I use Forge with digital oceans And that's what I've just always used for you know, all these projects and they digital ocean came out with I think it's called app platform, which is like their automated scaling system and maybe six months ago I went through and They added some new features and stuff and I was able to migrate it to that so that I have it to where it will
auto scale and You know You know as it needs more servers or whatever if I get you know, a lot of traffic one day It will scale up scale down I'm so I kind of migrated some of my apps to it and but I still use Forge for other things Some of my other projects I do
Gotcha. Gotcha. Yeah Yeah, see I've never had to deal with really auto scaling at all for for what I do You know, I can run a cheap box and we just cash everything and it's pretty simple So yeah, that's that's gonna be I think that will be a really nice use case for cloud is the auto scaling and all that stuff But I've actually not even on digital ocean where I'm still using Linode which got bought by somebody and So it but Akama I think might have bought them but let's be working
fine, you know, it's just Just a cheap server there But you you mentioned some extensions. So
this this brings back memories. I think the first time I interviewed you You had a weather extension for Chrome that was like crazy popular And and the if I'm not mistaken the back end was layer Vail, but then the front end was just the chrome Whatever you write chroma plugins in Yeah, yeah, I think that was I Think you were doing gonna do a series like this But on your on layer of El news and it was gonna be focused on interviewing people building stuff So yeah, I started a weather extension
just for my own use case I was in to building extensions and I wanted something like a little icon that shows the current weather in my browser So, you know, I just built it and put it out there I think it was using the dark sky API
originally if you remember that app. It was a really popular iOS app and I think I had you know a thousand free API request and I put it out there and I was like this will be fine and Real quickly, you know as it grew that that ran out real fast So then I was having to figure out.
Alright, how do I you know make money off this thing because it was just free So I what I realized is people were donating money because they just liked it So people were sending me money on like PayPal for building it to try to support it So then I put like a upgrade button. So It's still going it's out there You know, I Enjoyed working on it. I haven't really
done a lot of updates recently. It's kind of been stable people haven't been asking for anything but Yeah, if you go to weather extension calm and you want to check it out But it kind of you know runs itself it covers the bills I have like an upgrade on there and you know It's built on Laravel the back in But yeah, so it's one of the reasons it was growing and then it got hit by Once again talking about as soon as you start getting any kind of traffic or bigger it got spammed
by maybe a competitor I still don't know to this day, but it got spanned with thousands of one-star reviews, so It was like five star review people liked it and then overnight Google I guess they didn't have any kind of spam protection on their stuff You know, I went from five stars to like one star like overnight and once you get bad ratings, it kind of demotes it and it doesn't really show up and it kind of Stop growing as fast as it was and then you know
I started building other projects and you know kind of moved on once I realized most people expect the weather to be free like you know most weather apps are free and You know what are ad supported and you can't really do ads inside of an extension super great So I kind of moved on to something else But is it was a fun project and you know, that's that's type stuff like that To then building other things have all kind of built up my knowledge base on how to like keep a site like TDI
Oh I even running because of you know The DDoS attacks or the spam attacks or you know people trying to steal your API keys And all kinds of just malicious stuff that you have to deal with I've learned a lot from it. So
That's awesome. The yeah the dark sky I don't know if you're listening if you remember dark sky, but it was awesome back in the day It was like the best weather app and and then Apple bought them and then what shut them down I guess they integrated it with their current weather app maybe What'd you end up having to switch to is it like a government API you can call and it's just free now or yeah There's there's two you can if you if you upgrade I think you get access to another
one. There's somebody built a like Pretty much the same API in point and similar data sets and They built it, you know to kind of take the place of it Well to come or several companies did but I kind of integrated with two of them and they have you know Pretty good pricing models and similar data You know, but people the one complaint I still get is people emailed me saying your your extension says, you know It's not supposed to rain but it's raining And I'm like, okay, I have nothing to do
with the weather, you know, I'm just showing you the data and the API So it's kind of I get blamed for weather all around the world from this extension which I just tell them Okay. I mean, I don't really know what I can do but But yeah, there are there are government sites and I debated on you know well, maybe I could just build my own weather API service in charge for it and You know, I had this experience with the
weather stuff. So I looked at that and then You know kind of just decided to integrate and move on to other stuff But like, you know, you can for for the United States at least you can use the weather APIs And I think that's what a lot of these services are doing They're just government APIs But to build a service you really have to integrate any if you wanted to work worldwide you have to integrate with all these weather providers all around the world and kind of you take all of their data and
morph it into one single API that's just like longitude latitude and then Returned that and I just decided not not to go down that road but probably would have been a good idea and then could have you know sold it like like Dark sky did they had an API that you know was the the best that everybody used for weather applications Okay This is sort of off topic from L'Hareville or
whatever. But why do all the local like news Cast have their own weather apps is it they're just selling advertising off of that and that's how they're making money Is that their whole thing with having their own weather apps? I?
I don't yeah, I would imagine they want their own, you know Branding and a lot of it, you know, a lot of those sites are all Advertising like you almost can't even go to them because the ads are so bad without an ad blocker Yeah, I don't really have an answer to that other than they do claim though like, you know, your local weatherman will claim
He's accurate. Don't listen to like I've seen things don't look at your weather on your phone because it's not gonna work And there is a certain part of that but then you know What's the one job that you can be wrong 50% of the time and not get fired as a weatherman? So Anyways, I don't I don't know but yeah the you know, the the weather stuff is kind of you know It maybe it'll get better AI may fix it.
Maybe AI will you know be able to read the weather and make more accurate Predictions I've heard of that stuff But that's what dark sky was kind of I don't know how they were doing it what they were doing but they were supposedly analyzing radar and We're giving you know, you're back in the people don't wouldn't be amazed by this today but back in the day it was you would get an alert that it's gonna rain in 10 minutes and They were pretty accurate with it and
nobody else was doing that. It was it was it was neat though What they were able to do Yeah, that was awesome because you know I like to play golf and I would always have dark sky with with the alerts on and you know You'd be playing golf and be like it's gonna rain in 10 minutes and then and sure it was pretty accurate almost every time It was like, you know we would run to the trees and hide or you know run to the little court board or something and
It was it was pretty accurate. It was it was very rare that it gave me an alert and it didn't happen So I really liked that part
of the app. That was sweet Yeah, yeah, it was good that's what that's what got me interested in it with was wanting that on my browser in my browser and I was into extensions and I built you know a few other extensions in That you know extensions and Laravel are kind of what got me into building, you know side projects just I always like to build stuff that got you know, I would get users and You know, even if it was free just people
using my stuff. I thought it was really neat Yeah for sure the Anything else you've got out? I know you've got I'm trying to remember I remember the weather extension. Yes We'll back up a bit because you talked about my first interview.
Yeah, so back in the day I created a series called the artisan files and I would just send questions out to people that were building stuff in Laravel and This is sort of like a video podcast format of that You know Maybe I should have renamed this and not call it the creator series and call it the artisan files But yeah, that brings back so many memories now. I'm glad you
brought that up. That was fun Yeah, I enjoyed, you know talking about this stuff and You know, like I said just putting a lot most of my stuff was I put it out there for free and then You know if it blew up I would figure out how can I? You know make money off this or at least pay for it and keep it going That's just how I've
always done things. I I Start what kind of got me into it is I realized I made a blog Tim Leland calm and I put a post out and I guess I was just it was just pure luck but the post blew up and got shared on like some big news sites and an Overnight I woke up and it was like, you know made several hundred dollars off of affiliate Revenue from like Amazon and stuff and then also
Once I put it like ads on there. I was able to make money off that so that kind of Was like wait, I can go to sleep wake up and have made money overnight I was like, okay Maybe there's something else here. I need to figure out what else can I do and that's you know, why I just kept building stuff Yeah, that's awesome. Do you like if? Speaking to developers that maybe like want to get into creating their own products and stuff
like that. Is that sort of You know looking back is is that sort of what you would recommend is like just build stuff that you like and See if it takes off and if it does figure out a way to charge for it versus going the other route of like spending Six months and be like, all right, this is paid upfront, you know things like that
Yeah, I think so. I mean because you're gonna build stuff and You know if you put a ton of time into like planning it and you know I would talk to people and they'd be like, yeah, we're gonna start a business and they would you know, go get a business plan and they would go make an LLC for the business and hire lawyers and they haven't made a penny and I was like, I'm just gonna build the thing put it out there and if it picks up traction then You know figure out the next steps
Because I've you know, maybe you would get lucky on the first one But I've built so many small little apps and just put them out there and just kind of you know And a lot of them like you said are things I was interested in so the weather thing I was interested in because I Wanted a weather extension in my browser and I want to learn how browser extensions work because I was you know I used a ton of different extensions and then you know t.ly was created because I saw
Google shutting down their service and you know, I thought it would be a neat project and Originally built the extension and then so I built the extension and it grew to like maybe 200,000 users and I was like, okay, you got 200,000 users if just 1% converts to paying then you know, I'll be doing pretty good and You know, that's just kind of how I've
done things. It's just you know have an idea Build it put it out there And just see you know watch it and see how it grows if it doesn't go anywhere You know, I eventually kind of just kill it off and and then move on to the next thing More recently though since I've been focused on t.io. I've kind of quit some of that Because I've you know wanted to make sure
I stay focused on it. But before this I was you know every Every week I was building something different Yeah, we developers have that problem I think we we get in this mindset if we got to keep building stuff building stuff building stuff and not focus on the actual business that's actually working and then and then we You know that we just kind of let it fail because of lack of attention not lack of how good it is So that's that's a really good reminder there
The that it sort of reminds me of the way I started, you know in the whole development thing was You know it my first product was actually a classified script you could buy it and like run your own Craigslist I guess but this was way before Craigslist was a thing and It was all because you know I was working on a motorcycle dealership and people would bring their motorcycles in to try to trade them in and We're like we can't take your trade or whatever and but you can go here in place, you
know put it on my pre-loved motorcycles website and So then you know, I just I was like well I could probably sell this and then it just kind of picked up steam and you know lasted a few years made some money so it's always fun when you build something that you actually Are passionate about and enjoy because that actually keeps you engaged over the what it's gonna take to build a successful product. I think
Yeah, that's funny. You say that I one of the first projects I built with Laravel was like a Craigslist but the goal It was gonna be you know, Craigslist was popular But people were like posting that they were being like kidnapped and you know, they would meet up to buy something So I was like, how can I integrate this with like social media or something?
so I created a like a Craigslist, but it required Facebook login and And then it was gonna be like oh I could see your Facebook profile and then I could see your friends with somebody that I know and kind of build that trust and You know, I built it and it grew and it was you know, a neat project and then about like, you know Six months after I built it and it was and working on it Facebook launched Facebook Marketplace Which was pretty much what I built and
that that was kind of the sign. Okay let me go ahead and shut this down real quick because you had Obviously Facebook Marketplace kind of took off and what it was pretty much the same idea. So At least it validated what I was what I was thinking people wanted. So
Yeah, the even today. I think marketplace is now taking over Craigslist like I've Everybody up, you know, everybody locally is always like Facebook Marketplace and I've never I don't think I've heard Craigslist in years anybody using it so that's Yeah, that was pretty that was actually a really good idea cuz that was a Unique use case back then when all that it didn't exist. Yeah, I like that Yeah, yeah, I'll be interesting what Craigslist if you look at their traffic a
bit. It's on a just constant decline, but I think I made money off of selling maybe like job postings and I'm guessing people are still doing that but Yeah, those sites are crazy how like they haven't updated it in or at least visually in 20 years It's a interesting Thing that they just don't I guess don't care that's just the business model but I kind of like it just the nostalgic
look. It's kind of like the other that news website It's been around man since the 90s drudge report, you know, it's just it literally looks like it was built in front page It's just like when one page and they just update links on it all day long It's like, you know, it's kind of the novelty is kind of cool. I kind of like that Yeah, those are I mean that's the type of thing like if you could build I mean be hard to build that today, but build something that could just get constant traffic and
Imagine are there ads on there? That's probably how they make money either that or like sponsor posts or something but you know you build something and That's what one thing if if you could build something that doesn't require like paying users that's always a Bonus if you can figure out how to build like, you know One of these free online tools that you know are sponsored by ads or something like that Those are those are you know, always a interesting business model where you don't have users
you don't have a ton of support and You don't have to worry about all the a lot of the problems that come with it true so to switch gears back to layer veil like what's What's your I'm trying to think of how to word it to kind of Do something interesting like what's your favorite level feature? Like what's What's one thing that variable provides that you can't live without? Hmm so I Mean there's there's a lot that I'm trying to I could say it go with but I Think it's just if I want to build
something. I'm trying to think I threw up a website not too long ago and Yeah, if you just want to build a site and you want authentication and You want to connect to a database like not having to rebuild all that Scaffolding, I guess is is the reason that I've always used Laravel because I've worked for you know software companies where everything is built in-house and it's like If you were to build this application you'd spend, you know Six months building the groundwork and
I'm like they could just use Laravel and skip, you know Six months of work and they're probably doing it, you know, not as not as good as how they're you know If they're building their own authentication The the bugs and the security issues that come with that So I think you just being all like build a new application real quickly and you get all that Groundwork already done to where you can just get it and put it live but some of the stuff I mean I take Advantage of this is just like the
caching how easy it is to cache stuff And then obviously like the database and queues so jobs just I've worked for companies where if like, okay We're gonna put this on a job and it's like this complicated process versus in Laravel. It's just so easy to do That's that's I guess my main reasons for going with it Makes sense. Yeah. Yeah the What are you using?
You know anything sort of unique or wild in any of your apps that you know We might not know about like do you have a go-to package that you always use or anything like that?
Go to package No, I guess it depends on you know The application I try to you know limit any packages I pull in just because I know that you know, you add dependencies I Mean I think I always you know, I try to keep it pretty stock Laravel and not you know build anything crazy to where if you go to you know upgrade versions, it's not as difficult Hmm I guess if you were to do payments you could you know Say like a Laravel spark would be the
biggest one. So if I were to build a new application You know obviously the latest version of Laravel Go with their you know What I know the the one trouble I've had recently is if I'm not building something new and then staying up to date with like all The changes that are coming with like if I just want to you know build a new application You you go to install it and gives you so many options and then you're like, okay I got a research all the different front ends is now supporting
My favorite time was just when you would build it and it was using like view I'm a big view JS fan But you would build it it was a view, you know, that was the one Front in and then it was using Laravel mix for you know building your assets and compiling them It just seems simpler But maybe it's just because I was doing a whole lot more new projects versus now there's so many options it feels like I Don't even know all the options Think it's like five or six, you know,
you know, it steps through everything, you know everything from what database, you know You pick your front-end scaffolding you you know, and then once you pick that I think you then you pick What do you want live wire view or?
Alp or not whatever the other thing is But yeah, yeah, it's it's definitely grown, you know from that standpoint You know having to pick through all the different things as you as you go install a brand new app Which which is interesting, you know, it's it's sort of I Don't know if there's a good way of doing it You know from a create like from a layer of L standpoint because they want to offer all these things and make everybody happy It's like, you know, how could you simplify all that but
maybe in layer of L12?
They'll they'll come up with something ingenious and we won't have to even think about them anymore Yeah, sometimes less options is better Just make just go with it and then figure out that one and then not you know not have to make a decision That may be an interesting way, but yeah, I liked it when I just you know could spin it up and it was You know, I knew I knew what I was getting out I I think like even now you can like pick don't install Authentication which I guess makes sense
because there's not always gonna be authentication not all applications are gonna be needing off but Yeah, it's tricky I read sometimes where Taylor will post, you know, whatever You know, he's trying to make this person happy but then this whole group's gonna be you know upset or he wants to have these different front-end languages and
Yeah. Anyways, it's a tough job Yeah, yeah, I don't envy that that part of building a very successful framework it just seems like it's No matter what you do somebody's gonna be mad You just had to make a decision and go with it. Yeah, and they get feedback and then maybe maybe adjust or pivot in the future but yeah, that's Very true well Well Tim what anything else that maybe we've missed that you want to talk about before we close this thing out uh No, I'd be I think you posted something
about Laravel cloud. That's something I'm kind of interested in You know, that's it. That's a neat Feature coming or you know option coming. That's a little another thing of where to host it but No, I don't really have anything else to share Gotcha. Gotcha. Yeah the I got to
speaking of Laravel cloud. I went to Upstate PHP, which is in Greenville, South Carolina last night and Jason bags did a demo of Laravel cloud and It's pretty sweet it's it's got a lot of the the Forge feel to it, you know You can kind of do everything you can do in Forge this this is from my point of view I'm not a I've only ever used Forge so I don't know the differences and all the the you know, all this cloud stuff, but uh But yeah, and then it spins up servers can hibernate on can
do all the other stuff So it's it's really sweet and the of
course the UI looks really good. I'm I'm sort of interested on What they're gonna do with it in the future because I think I don't know I just get the vibes like you You're gonna be able to do so much more with cloud You know like Laravel new Probably that can integrate with cloud and then you don't even have to make half these decisions anymore cuz it's just gonna automatically upload it And you've got your site and and you know, it just defaults to whatever they liked the most
So I don't know I'm sort of interested with the next year year holds I know cloud supposed to come out sometime this quarter so that that should be pretty interesting and sweet Yeah, yeah that will be neat just to make it simple Like, you know, somebody wants to build a website and there's so many steps to getting a website built and putting it online But making you know making it easier to word that all that's kind of working together It's definitely definitely neat
But yeah now this were go ahead no, that's that's kind of it I was What was I gonna say Yeah, I don't know that's that's really neat Yeah, it's always speaking of all the steps though You know, it's it feels like there is a lot now But like if you think back into like the early 2000s, it was like a whole lot of steps and now it's it's you know With Forge and all these other things.
It's it's pretty simple But it still is still is a lot of steps and it seems like all that should be streamlined So I'm like in the future that we're all headed into. Oh Yeah, yeah, it will be interesting what they do with I see a lot of like Malicious links with the TDI. Oh, I so I deal with that but like vercel and cloud flare like their workers pages those are constantly targeted for like
Malicious links and stuff. So I'm curious of how how Laravel is gonna handle that I imagine they're Already know that's gonna be a problem. But I think they're gonna if they give you a way to see You know, if they're doing the hosting themselves I'm curious of how they're gonna handle that because before with Forge they didn't really have to handle that They kind of just offloaded that to like, you know, like Linna or digital ocean But that that's gonna be a challenge for them
That's very true. Yeah, that's something.
Yeah, I haven't even thought about that but yeah, that's because you could spin up any spam site off of a Assume they give you a subdomain or something and then just be like, yeah That's usually how it is I think I've seen that on their platform to where it will be like a subdomain and that's nice because it's you know great you could just you know create a new layer of a lot put it out there and then Get a URL back that's you know live But then with that like we were talking earlier
It just comes the the the bad side of the internet the malicious side of the internet comes out. So Yeah, the well this that sort of reminds me. Do you remember github pages?
You know you could host your own pay, you know You're on site with pages and back in the day you could it was actually I think a subdomain off of github.com But then they found out there was a security issue where you could actually steal cookies or something from the the main calm So now then they switched everything it's not it's not off of
github.com. It's off of something else And you know all that it's super interesting all the the ways, you know the cat and mouse of you figure out something cool and then they just figure out how to break it and scam people and Yeah, and they probably switched the domain because the github domain was probably constantly getting Flagged and that's the whole topic we go down. But the you know domains get flagged and they get put on these Blacklist and then you know browsers
block them. It's all kinds of crazy stuff happens. So Anyways, yeah, yeah deep deep dark rabbit hole that we can go down for a day Yeah, we do a follow-up sometime That sounds good. Well T. M. I don't want to hold you up all day But man, I appreciate you taking time to come meet with me and you know, talk about everything you're building You know if you're out there and you're looking for a nice URL shortening service T ly is the way to go. I'm a customer actually and
Supporter of it. So so go check them out for sure Yeah, awesome. Thank you