URL shortening services are plentiful at the moment. With micro blogging services such as Twitter restricting posting to 140 characters we need to shorten URLs can can waste those valuable characters. I have always wanted to keep URL shortening to a domain of my choice rather than using bit.ly or tinurl etc, mainly because I am curious. Here is how I have done it.
A quick search on the Internet and you will find several offerings of different solutions of how to shorten URLs using your very own domain for example Google offer a url shortening service for their domain app customers. However some of these seemed quite complicated and I just wanted something really simple. As I was not bothered about statistics or anything I just wanted something where I could enter the domain I wanted to shorten, press go and then it would provide me with a shortened URL using the domain I wanted.
My first tasks was to find a domain that I could use or this shortening. The first requirement of such as domain was that it was short (of course!). I also wanted it to represent Equal Web Creative and therefore I tried all sorts of three letter dot two letter domains. To my surprise the only one that I could get that was reasonably priced was http://eqw.be. I purchased this and then added it to my hosting package.
The solution that I settled on was a shortening script by Shaun Inman called Lessn. This seemed to tick all the boxes as it was simply and worked with PHP and MySQL, tools that I am fairly familiar with. I download the script followed the very simply instructions in the readme/txt file provided and hey presto, my very own URL shortening service using a domain of my choice.
Leave a Reply