I’ve been working on web stuff for this past year with Lauren, my girlfriend; in fact, if you go to subvertallmedia.com, you’ll find that we’re now using it as our portfolio site. Our first collaboration was Woe’s “Withdrawal” site early last year, we’re finishing up our full rebuild of phillymetal.com, and we have another project that’s occupied all the rest of our time that I’ll be able to announce soon. One other project was metalurl.com, which I’m happy to say is online now.

MetalURL.com is in the class of “URL shorteners,” I guess, in that you give it an address and it spits out a different one, but it does not shorten the address, it just makes it more metal. So, for instance, I can now link someone to http://metalurl.com/315-dragon-infiltrator-bathory instead of blog.subvertallmedia.com.

This site owes a heavy debt to shadyurl.com, which makes any URL look like something your corporate content filter would block. I wanted a way to make metal URLs appropriate for any forum. Don’t think http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6_EJ-6WF7g is as ferocious as it should be? Just send them to http://metalurl.com/34-wolf-satan-torture instead.

The backend of the site is quite simple. Rails 3, jQuery handles the submit and returns the link. Very simple basic auth for my backend, since we only have one user and didn’t want to make it too complicated. It’s on a free Heroku instance + $9 database add-on. Lauren handled every part of the interface, including the creation of the three logos and their companion themes, and I took care of the backend. It was a fun project, I’m happy to see people using it a little.