Interoperable Cloud Sevrices at First Pair

How AI helps to build exactly the things you need that no existing SaaS supports.

For many years I used Bitly with a free plan, and managed to tack on a custom domain, chief.sc, in there. A decade of shortcuts followed. I prefer free plans for durable resources to decouple them from credit card failures. Alas, at some point bitly enforced custom domains only on paid plans, retaining the old ones but allowing only bit.ly URLs to be created in that crowded namespace. Then I subscribed to cutt.ly to do the same with oss.ci, but had to struggle with certs and whatnot.

So I built suffix.org -- a next-generation URL shortener, with multiple cool domains on the Pro plan, and a business plan including an option to store photo targets locally, as well as documents! There's a Rust CLI, team support, and the ability to move domains across accounts.

But that was not all. I blogged on Medium under chiefscientist.org (another story of custom domain support made tricky), that used to have an API I'm grandfathered into, but draft-once-only. As a blog-syncing aficionado, I've written Omnighost, an Obsidian plugin that can import your Ghost posts, sync them back and forth, imprint Git commit as provenance, and update many such blogs at once. So I needed a mirror of the Medium blog, and I reused the stagnant chief.sc for it.

Which had left all the old links dangling. My hosted Ghost blog at chief.sc was run by my good friends at digitalpress.blog out of Bratislava. I built my own DNS service, RGBDNS (pair.rs/rgbdns) to serve it via the ANAME record I've also proposed to IETF (https://chief.sc/aname-ietf), but all the suffixes went dark.

So I built a new kind of SaaS interop -- URL reservation service. Suffix supports an API where an authorized partner can check whether a URL on a domain managed by both the partner and Suffix is available, and can reserve it atomically. Suffix can do the same against the partner in a proper atomic way.

I run Ghost on my own box, with the DNS authoritative for it. I apply a small isolated patch to the Ghost codebase to insert the URL reservation protocol. Suffix supports it natively via its API, SDK, and CLI.

You can embed Suffix shortening widget in your own app and let users shorten their URLs! The included domains so far are

[suf.cx]() -- default and free domain, edit your own suffix or generate a short one

[oss.ci ]()-- good for OSS

[bay.news]() -- good for announcements, especially By the Bay

[pair.rs]() -- good for code, especially Rust

[foto.gs]() -- photos and photogs!

Previously, a scenario where you need to share resources across hosted SaaS systems such as Ghost and Suffix was very hard and brittle. Now I built it, migrated all URLs from Bitly API and Cuttly screenshots and API, and have all of my shortcuts from years ago back, verified, and usable again -- with my own DNS logs and full traffic observability. I love to watch your agents slurp it all.