November 2, 2007
  - No more SOAP API, sorry!  A new and much more extensive JSON/REST
    based API is coming up. The old REST and XMLRPC APIs continue to work.
  - New better "My Metamark" page
  - 50% rewired internals to make future enhancements much easier!

May 15, 2007
  - We updated the software to put less load on our servers and give
    you faster responses.  Everybody wins!

February 13, 2006
  - The service was slow or unresponsive for a couple of minutes in
    the afternoon while we upgraded the internals of the system in
    preperation for some new features coming soon.

July 22, 2005
  - User registration via Bitcard.  See stats on the URLs you've
    shortened.
  - Added TCL API examples, thanks Jordan!

April 30, 2004
  - Add "extensible urls".  You can add extra path information after
    the short url and it'll get included in the "expanded" url. This
    also works via the API.  For example http://xrl.us/bn redirects to
    http://askask.com/, so http://xrl.us/bn/notes/ redirects to
    http://askask.com/notes/
  - Check the URL with the SURBL Spam
    URI Realtime Blocklist before adding it to the database.  We
    should probably run through the database every so often and check
    old urls.

April 2, 2004 
  - Got the first abuse report (surprised it took that long, sad it
    didn't take longer), so I added functionality to disable short urls
    for abuse.

March 26, 2004
  - Moved to a new server
  - Many internal changes to prepare for an open source release,
    including basing the system on Combust.
  - Add "extensible urls".  You can add extra path information after the short url and it'll
    get included in the "expanded" url. This also works via the API.

February 19 2004
  - Made the shortening engine not reuse a short url if it has a
    secret (Thanks Phillip Hallam-Baker!)
  - Will do the redirect directly without the "landing page" even on
    the first visit to xrl.us
  - Made the shortening engine never use L's to avoid confusion with
    1's (which have never been used, but anyway ...)

November 14 2003
  - Added a basic statistics page

September 16 2003
  - Added Python API examples (Thanks Sopsy!)
  - Metamark.net domain hijacked.

May 21 2003
  - More aggressive retries when we check a URL to be added
    (to be compatible with uber-broken web servers)

April 13 2003
  - Added PHP API example (Thanks Martin!)

March 29 2003
  - Strip out commas, dots, etc from the end of the short url when
    redirecting.

March 10 2003
  - Compatibility with IMDb.
  - Change User-Agent string to say XRL/1.00 instead of xrl/0.10.
    (unrelated to the imdb fix) :-)

March 2 2003
  - Added helpful "Link to ..." text to the added form.
  - Removed 'beta' flag from the navigation.

January 14 2003
  - Added link to the OS X Services Menu service

January 13 2003
  - Fix compatibility with target.com.  Like Amazon they don't always
    allow HEAD requests, but they do it a bit differently than Amazon.
    Thanks to Joshua Keroes for the spot.

January 12 2003
  - Various improvements to the "shorten" bot on irc.perl.org (and
    other networks).

January 11 2003

  - Fixed a bug when incoming urls had newlines in them (they are now
    stripped)

  - Added script to convert text to use Metamark urls.

  - Added an expiration policy

  - Added a lookup method to the APIs.


January 7 2003  

  - Generating all pages dynamically is no excuse for not supporting
    If-Last-Modified headers.  Fixed the site to support them.