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Archives for December 2009

Start Your Own URL Shortener

Are you thinking about running your own URL shortener? If you own a blog or a website, you should consider. There are many valid reasons why you should own your own url shortener.

#1 Branding

Having your own url shortener promotes your website and your blog. Your visitors will see your unique link. When you tweet or share a link with someone, the link you share is yours. It’s unique. It carries your own brand. The short url from bit.ly, tinyurl.com, is.gd, tr.im, cli.gs or from any other 3rd party service works great, but it’s not yours. My personal url shortener is uly.me. Every article on my blog has a short url. Check out the short url at the end of this article. You will see a Tweet This button below.

#2 Independence

There are over 100 url shortener services on the internet. Most of these 3rd party url shortener services are free. There is, however, no guarantee that they will keep their services up and running for eternity. You, however, have control of your own website and your own links. You can control how url shortener behaves. You’ll have the option to determine which hashing methods to use, from base36 to base64, from sequential to random. You call your own shots.

#3 Statistics

Another reason for having your own url shortener is you want to keep track of your statistics. Not every url shortener service has statistics. Every time you’ve send an email with a link, you want to know if your recipient has clicked on your link. If you sent a tweet, you would like to know how many people have clicked on your links. Statistics informs you of the effectiveness of your tweets.

#4 Security

Some people don’t trust short urls since they are essentially cloaked links. There is no telling where a cloaked link will take you. Cloaked links can lead someone to an untrusted or a phishing site. You could easily acquire a virus, malware, adware or spam when you land on an untrusted site. If you run your own website or blog and you use your own short urls, you establish trust with your own readers. On top of that, you are promoting your own brand.

How do I make one?

Ok. convinced. How do I get started? How do I make one? The good news is you can get it here. My url shortener script is available for only $49.99. See features below:

Try the Demo >  http://uly.me

Features

  • Requires PHP, MySQL, .htaccess
  • Works with any domain
  • 1 configuration file.
  • 1 second install
  • Base36 encoding
  • Can be modified to use Base64
  • Sequential links from 10000 to zzzzz
  • Hashing can be set to random.
  • Supports up to 2 billion links
  • Statistics: display number of clicks
  • Statistics: display last 10 links
  • Search for partial keywords
  • API: simple integration with 3rd party software
  • API format: create.php?url=http://longurl…..
  • URL format of http://short.url/1z35sf
  • Seamless integration with WordPress and Twitter
  • WordPress: works great with Tweet This plugin
  • Creates short url link when publishing a WordPress article
  • Price includes installation, support and updates

Try the Demo >  http://uly.me

Purchase for only $49.99

Posting Via Email

Posting via email is one of few features used sparingly by WordPress users. Most bloggers use the Admin – Dashboard interface to publish a post. Posting via email is a feature that has been around as long as I can remember, perhaps going back as far back as version 1.5. I’ve posted on via email once before and I don’t remember any details. To this day, I don’t know why I don’t use it. I thought I give this feature another try. Why not. The advantage of posting via email is you can work on an offline article with an email client. Another advantage is sending posts from a phone.

Ok, success. I was able to send a post via email. You are reading this article as proof. Just a couple of interesting things I want to add to the original post. You need to run wp-mail.php each time you send a post. That’s each time! Well, that sucks. I was hoping this whole process would be automated. You can however, install a plugin called WP-Cron, similar to the Unix command called cron, that will run wp-mail.php every 15 minutes or so. Better yet, if you have access to your server, just add a cron job to run wp-mail.php every 15 minutes.

If you need help in setting up your WordPress to send posts via email, you can read the documentation and installation setup here.

Once in Every Blue Moon

The term “once in every blue moon” means a rare event. Something that doesn’t happen very often. A blue moon occurs when there are two new moons in a month. The second new moon is called a blue moon. This New Year’s Eve just happens to be a blue moon. So, here’s wishing you for an extra-ordinary new year.