TJantunen.com

May 20 2009

Shorten Your URLs

Published by TJantunen at 7:00 under General

There are dozens of services out there that let you shorten your URLs. First one I ever heard of, which must be a decade ago, was tinyurl.com. I’ve tried almost all of the tr.im, bit.ly, z.pe, snipurl, etc etc, and now the phrase shorten your urls is trending on twitter because of good.ly (which gives a donation to charity via your shortened amazon URLs etc).

There are sites that compare and contrast the different URL shortening tools pointing out that some of them have built in stats and analytics, others let you add a thin, paying ad banner to the top of your shortened page (adjix.com), others give you very, very short URLs and more.

However, none of them are branded for your own site, so when you shorten your URLs for your blog posts, you add a step (albeit transparent) where another domain gets a hit for your link. Not any more. Wordpress users, you can use their own web domain to shorten your URLs using a plugin known as WordTwit.

I mentioned WordTwit the other day, it lets you automatically tweet your latest blog post, and as online media strategist Ari Herzog points out, is much more instantaneous than tools such as TwitterFeed that rely on your RSS and the often tardy Feedburner.

But the most important point about WordTwit is that you can set it to shorten your URLs to your own domain e.g. this post is shortened to sciencetext.com/Hg, which is a great URL for an alchemist and as you can see retains the sciencetext.com brand.