Make your own link shortener

With the popularity of Twitter and the need to keep ‘tweets’ within the 140-character limit, someone came up with the clever idea of a link-shortening service. The idea is that sometimes you want to include a link in your tweet, but some URLs are really long, like the following link to a Wikipedia article which has 67 characters in the URL:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL_shortening#Registering_a_short_URL

If you wanted to include this URL in your tweet it would take up almost half of the available characters, so you might have to shrink your message to accommodate the link. Link shortening services like bit.ly and goo.gl and others provide you with a unique short URL that will redirect to the longer one, so you drop the short link into your tweet—or in your email or web page: you can use them anywhere you would use a link—and when someone clicks the short link it directs them to the longer URL. This leaves more room in your tweet for your message, and minimizes the number of characters used for links.

For example, I shortened the Wikipedia article URL above using my own shortening service I set up yesterday, which uses only 17 characters: http://stacy.cc/4

I used a free PHP script-based tool called YOURLS (Your Own URL Shortener) found at yourls.org. You can register a short domain name of your own, install and configure the YOURLS software on the domain, and you’re up and running with your own service. Domain registrations are pretty cheap as well, so this is a very low-cost solution if you need it. I registered the stacy.cc domain through my hosting provider, Dreamhost, for $25. I had the whole thing up and running in less than two hours.

Why create your own rather than use one of the freely-available services already out there? The best reason I can think of is control. If you use someone else’s service to handle link redirecting for you, then you run the risk of losing this function if the service shuts down, and your shortened URLs will no longer work. For most people I don’t think it’s a big deal if they’re just using it for Twitter, but if you like the idea of running and controlling your own service, and you’d like to use a custom/branded domain for your redirects, setting up a service like this is a quick and inexpensive option.

 

Posted: June 16th, 2011
Filed under: Development, Free (or low-cost), Innovation, Social Networking, Software, Tips Tags: , | No Comments »

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