gHacks technology news » url shortening http://www.ghacks.net A technology blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas. Tue, 24 Nov 2009 03:24:03 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 Stumbleupon URL Shortening Service Su.pr Out Of Beta http://www.ghacks.net/2009/07/09/stumbleupon-url-shortening-service-su-pr-out-of-beta/ http://www.ghacks.net/2009/07/09/stumbleupon-url-shortening-service-su-pr-out-of-beta/#comments Thu, 09 Jul 2009 07:49:43 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=14268 suprOh noes, not another URL shortening service. That’s probably the first reaction of many users who read the announcement that Stumbleupon’s URL shortening service Su.pr is now available publicly. As if there were not enough services of this kind already. There are however a few aspects of su.pr that make it quite unique in its own right which in turn could make it interesting for some users to use. Su.pr works like any other URL shortening service on the outside. Users can write a message of up to 140 characters in the box and Su.pr will automatically shorten the URL that is posted in that message to save characters.

The very same page contains additional options to shorten the message and post it to Twitter or Facebook. Both of these options require a Stumbleupon account which gets linked to the Twitter and Facebook account.

supr_front

Su.pr provides two interesting options that can make it interesting to users. The first is that every url that gets shortened gets also submitted to Stumbleupon. That option might be especially interesting to webmasters who post their new blog posts or websites to Twitter or Facebook anyway. This way they can post it to Stumbleupon as well which usually generates some extra traffic. Some webmasters have experienced hundreds of additional visitors coming from Stumbleupon using this method. A Wordpress plugin has been provided by Stumbleupon to automate the process.

It is furthermore possible to move the shortened url from su.pr to the domain the blog is hosted on so that links will point to that domain instead.

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The second interesting aspect of Su.pr is an extensive statistics section which will give the user traffic details about the url that has been posted. This includes clicks, referrers, re-tweets and reviews. A last option that sounds interesting is the ability to schedule posts.

Su.pr is a convenient URL shortening service with some interesting features. It could become very popular with webmasters who post their articles and websites to Twitter and Facebook. Their main benefits are the statistics that are provided and that the url gets posted to Stumbleupon as well.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2009/07/09/stumbleupon-url-shortening-service-su-pr-out-of-beta/feed/ 0 rickroll.it: Double RickRoll someone! http://www.ghacks.net/2009/02/05/rickrollit-double-rickroll-someone/ http://www.ghacks.net/2009/02/05/rickrollit-double-rickroll-someone/#comments Thu, 05 Feb 2009 21:13:23 +0000 Joe http://www.ghacks.net/?p=10354 For too long, people have hid rickrolls in TinyURLs. A much better service to hide them in is rickroll.it. No one would suspect a thing!

The service is just a URL shortening service, but one I love to use because no one dares to click the link. I often post non-RR content in one of these, but I feel I have used the power of Astley to trick them nonetheless.

Rick Roll It! is mainly just a piece of fun but is fast and very user-friendly. Unfortunately, features such as ‘previews’ which TinyURL has are not available with rickroll.it.

This site is obviously primarily a tool for mischief.

A way to boost the Schadenfreude achieved through rickrolling someone, though, is to con someone into actually clicking a rickroll.it link, which leads to a rickroll. Like this one.

So, how many people can trick a friend with this one?

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2009/02/05/rickrollit-double-rickroll-someone/feed/ 1 Url Revealer http://www.ghacks.net/2008/12/23/url-revealer/ http://www.ghacks.net/2008/12/23/url-revealer/#comments Tue, 23 Dec 2008 19:02:47 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=9301 Url shortening services like Tinyurl have seen an influx since the release of web services like Twitter. Twitter is a prime example as the services limits the amount of characters per message to 160 much like SMS on cell phones. Yes, you can write / send multiple messages but that’s not really the same, is it?

If you head over to Twitter and log into your account you most likely will see links of shortening services. While they make links shorter so that you can save chars they also hide the real address of the link which in its extreme could be used to lure users to a website they do not want to visit. This can have serious consequences depending on the location or place the links are accessed: Think of following a link leading to an adult site at work.

Long URL Please is a experimental Firefox extension that turns urls of shortening services to their original one. It currently supports about 30 different services with more being added regularly.

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The developers have created a bookmarklet as well which can be used if you work with other web browsers. Some users have claimed that the extension dropped the performance while surfing while others have not experienced it. It might depend on the speed of the computer and Internet connection.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2008/12/23/url-revealer/feed/ 2 Shrinkomatic URL Shortening With A Twist http://www.ghacks.net/2008/11/26/shrinkomatic-url-shortening-with-a-twist/ http://www.ghacks.net/2008/11/26/shrinkomatic-url-shortening-with-a-twist/#comments Tue, 25 Nov 2008 23:04:41 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=8535 Ghacks author Daniel Pataki is pretty busy these days with all the new Internet websites and services that he is creating. His latest service is called Shrinkomatic. It is an url shortening service with one interesting unique feature.

But first things first. To shorten an url one would simply head over to the Shrinkomatic website and paste the url in the form on the main page. The service creates a unique short url in the form shrinkomatic.com/xyz which will redirect to the original url. This is definitively not the shortest url for an url shortening service but any name that is easy to remember should be fine for most users because that’s what url shortening is all about.

If you sign up for an account you can manage all the urls that have been created with the service. The list does contain a very nice and maintainable overview of the created urls. It also provides access to statistics detailing how many times the link was accessed (url trackin).

The unique feature are special urls for websites. Special urls are located at their own subdirectory of the website. While this does not necessarily different to creating a single link to a website it does provide the site owner with additional statistics.

The site owner will see all links that point to his website by all users of the service. That’s an excellent way of keeping track of the links if the service is used a lot.

Daniel has some great plans for the service. Users will be able to export their links to txt or csv and also share their links with others. He has more in the pipeline but some features are to unique to be spilled yet.

You can read about new announcements at the Shrinkomatic blog or visit Shrinkomatic directly to shrink some urls.

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