Blogging For Money

Many websites have very long URLs for their articles, especially more so with blogs that rely on automated permalinks which reuse their titles. For example, a URL can be as follows:

http://www.bismikaallahuma.org/archives/2008/resolving-the-christian-i-know-nothing-multi-problem-in-textual-criticism/

Such long URLs can actually break if you try to repost them in forums or e-mails. So what is the solution? You use a URL shortener, of course! With a URL shortener, the long URL example I gave above can easily be shortened into:

http://7les.com/2bb

Short and sweet, right?

There are literally hundreds of URL shorteners out there, which has become even more popular with the use of Twitter (which has a limited word count for posting). Here are some interesting URL shorteners that I’ve found all over the web, categories according to their functionality.

1. URL shorteners with detailed statistics

Worthy mentions would be tr.im, bit.ly and cli.gs, which are popular and comes with detailed statistics. Cli.gs, for example, even has private stats, so only you can see them.

2. URL shorteners with useful features

There is clockurl.com which activates and deactivates urls at certain times. I’m sure you can see the use for this one as you see fit. There is also viewista.com which allows the shortening of multiple URLs in one URL and supports multi-view. Another interesting service to check out is checkthislink.com, where you can enter message prior to displaying the site.

Special mentions include ow.ly and sexyurl.to, which are interesting by themselves.

3. URL shorteners that do not sound like one

There are quite a number of free URL shortener services which fits this category easily. They include 7les.com, retwt.me (good for Twitter, suggestive) and icanhaz.com (good for certain audiences). Other worthy mentions include idek.net, delivr.com, and x.se.

With the plethora of services out there in the wild, I am sure that you can come up with more interesting finds that can be shared with others. If you do, let us know in the comments section so that other readers will benefit from it.