December 8th, 2008

How to host your own short URLs

There are countless URL shortening services out there that shortens your URLs, only a handful lets you track clicks. A service that lets you shorten URLs using your own domain name is even harder to find. Shorty is one of the rare gems.


Shorty lets you install your own URL shortening service on your server. Suberapps.com for instance, if I shorten a URL, the shortened URL will look something like this http://suberapps.com/u/37162. Isn’t it cool that you can finally post short URLs on Twitter with a link that reflects your own domain name?

Here’s a number of reasons why hosting your own short URLs is better:

1) More exposure for your site’s domain name
2) Hosting your URLs on external sites means all your URLs will be gone if the service dies
3) More control over the name of the shortened link
4) Track number of clicks

Few ways you can use Shorty:

1) On Twitter, Facebook etc
2) On your blog, if you want to track clicks to certain pages or links on your blog / site
3) Send a link via email and see if the recipient have clicked on the link
4) Use your imagination

The good thing about using Shorty is the many useful features, there are a number of ways you can shorten a URL:

1) Auto

After pasting the link into the URL field, shorty will get the domain’s name (without www or .com, .net) and append it at the end of your domain name. Just type and finish off the rest of address to get your short URL.



2) Keywords

Just type at least one keyword to complete your short URL.



3) Random

The fastest way to use Shorty is using Random. Shorty appends a random number behind your domain name.



Tracking Links

You can easily track number of clicks to your links via the Admin, edit or delete the link(s).



Missing Feature

One thing I find missing from Shorty is the Bookmarklet feature, that lets you easily shorten a link by clicking the bookmark on the bookmark bar. This feature is provided by almost all short URL hosting sites, hopefull they’ll add this on in future updates.

What is required to host Shorty on your site?

1) Your own web server and domain name of course!
2) PHP 4 or higher
3) mySQL 3.23 or higher
Download the package from Shorty’s website to get started.

Hosting short URLs via Wordpress

Alternatively you can also host your own short URLs via a Wordpress plugin, Twitip recently featured a post on that.

Have fun!




Tips n Tricks . Web Apps