Have you ever vested time and energy into something only to have someone else let you down and abandon, sell or give up on it? Not long ago I was a big advocate of drop.io I had used it extensively, became an affiliate, created youtube videos and much more. You might have read recently that drop.io was acquired by Facebook and will no longer be providing service effective December 15th of December 2010. This left me high and dry with a few clients, scrambling to fill the holes. Perhaps this is the same reason why many top new media advocates recommend that you control your “home base” wherever that might be. Note this candid advice from @Shonali Burke a friend of mine:
IMHO no matter how many changes Facebook makes, many of which can be great promotional tools for people as well as businesses, nothing can compare to having your own base on the web. That is the one place you “own,” which you don’t on Twitter, Facebook, Amplify, etc. As the old song goes, “they can’t take that away from me”…!
Home of bit.ly namespace declared unsafe
Shortly after that I was reading how .ly was owned by Libya and they are arbitrarily disconnecting some domains without so much as a bit of notice. This is a problem for me because nearly all of my current shortened urls are stored on bit.ly using the main bit.ly domain. If for whatever reason or whimsical decisions Libya decides to kill bit.ly I would be in a world of hurt with hundreds of links orphaned. What happens when a domain name falls off the internet? Anything trying to access that website will probably end up on the now familiar Opendns page and not the website they had planned to access:
Joe’s own URL Shortener is born – msol.us
I decided to try to setup my own url shortener as a hedge against the possibility of orphaning a bunch of links. While doing research I came across a nice article on Lifehacker about how to create your own URL shortening service. Being a regular reader of the site, I knew that it was probably a quality solution so I tried it out. The shortest domain that I own is msol.us, one digit more than bit.ly not bad. Especially not bad considering 1 and 2 digit sub urls will be available (i.e. http://msol.us/ms goes to my company’s website, versus http://bit.ly/17CUAH on bit.ly saving 3 digits overall). As another example I also created a very simple shortened link for this article, it will forever be http://msol.us/1 which sure beats http://bit.ly/fwuIfe (the bit.ly equivalent).
DIY Difficulty level – Moderate
I would say creating your own url shortener site is not for the faint of heart. I would recommend it to people who are fairly tech savvy and have some under the hood understanding of mysql databases. While this article is not a how to, the one thing I would suggest to add to the Lifehacker article about YOURLS is that you should put the files in the root of the domain you want to use. I started using /urls sub directory and that added 5 digits to the shortened links. How often do you wish you had 5 more characters while posting to Twitter? I know I do quite often!
Adding my first url
I decided to make my company’s website the first url because I could use /ms and have a very tight/short url to use, here is a screenshot of the created link:
Not unlike bit.ly I had the option to share and since I was authoring this post, I customized and tweeted it out:
A James Brown Moment?
I am not dancing like James Brown singing “I feel good” but I am feeling quite comfortable that in addition to controlling my company website, dns and blog I also now control my own url shortener. Blame the IT control freak in me, but I would definitely recommend you consider bringing your url shortening in house. You will not have to worry about all your link assets being compromised.
A Word of Caution
It’s great to have your own url shortener but realize that you do need to backup and maintain it. There is a mysql database as well as some files that will need to be backed up periodically to protect this asset. If you fail to protect the asset you could end up orphaning all the links you created with it! The most important thing to do is to regularly backup the mysql database, here is an article that explains mysql backup methods. Another area of concern is if you do not setup the users and passwords your shortening service could be publicly accessed. Alternatively if you do not enable SSL your password could easily be compromised by a Firesheep user while accessing it at your local Starbucks.
Make this post better
I realize that this is a very important topic, what else would you also like to see on this topic? Here are some ideas I had, please vote for one or suggest your own via comments.
- A screencast of the full process start to finish.
- A tour of the YOURLS interface, capabilities.
- More on the “home base” concept, controlling your own/company presence online.
- Explain the technical challenges for SSL, Passwords and Backups more thoroughly.
- Something else? Leave a comment. Thank you!
Great post Joe. Great post!
@podcastdoors Thank you, glad you enjoyed it. Let me know if there is anything else you’d like to know about the subject. I definitely felt like I scratched the surface of something here.
#2 A tour of the YOURLS interface, capabilities. 🙂 Thank you so much for the info, Joe. Very useful content, as always! Dali
I certainly agree with you that URL shorting services are something for everyone to be concerned about. When you weigh the fact that you don’t know just how they are being tracked or what information is being gathered together with how much you depend on short URL’s anymore it soon becomes that the prudent thing to do is handle it yourself if you can.
And I’ve been looking into the matter of doing just that for awhile now. And I had seen and read the LifeHacker article on URL shortners that you used to set this up. I was just a little hesitant and was hoping for further feed back as to how well it worked and what some of the pitfalls in installation might be. And then you posted this article. That gave me those answers I needed and more and it’s something that I feel ready to do now.
So as always thanks for a good article and some timely advice.
@DaliBurgado Thanks for the feedback on the next steps, I am thinking a screencast is in order related to item #2 🙂 a test drive perhaps?
Thank you for the RT as well, always appreciated.
@kstaxman glad this found you at the right time Frank. I think the lifehacker article plus my suggestions and warnings ought to provide you with a great way to start with confidence on this venture. I can tell you’ve already processed things down to a high level of understanding and detail as you always seem to do. 🙂
Thanks for your comment.
This is a great read, and thanks so much for including me, Joe. I think a screencast would be terrific, it would be very helpful for people like me who like to see explanations in a visual way.
I downloaded Yourls a little while ago, did the checksum check, bought the url I want to use and so Joe, I say yes, yes, yes to 1, 2, 3, and 4 above – and the more detailed and hand-holding the better. 🙂
@Shonali Thanks for sharing this out and for your kind comments Shonali. Your quote really fabulously summed up what I was looking to say, it fit perfectly.
Screencast will be done, I am thinking of doing 2, one where I go through the process in detail and another using the interface so people can decide if it is worth the trouble. 🙂
@photographworks Ok then, you are making it easy for me. Thanks for the input.
We created our own shortener too, but I’m really bad about using it. I guess I should practice what I preach?!
@ginidietrich Yes, you should use it, perhaps my first screencast should emphasis the use of it, show how to make it easier to do just that? Thanks for dropping by. 🙂
@hackmanj You want to know why I don’t use it? It’s branded and I feel like it’s a bit over-the-top. Yes, I know I’m a communication professional so this should be second nature to me. But it’s not.
@ginidietrich What url did you use? I used a somewhat obscure domain I registered to provide a short url for some items. As luck would have it, things worked out nicely. I could see how this could be an issue.
Hey Joe – Just wanted to say, great post, but wanted to clarify a thing about bit.ly. – While there is always a chance a domain can be taken down by another country that owns the domain space, bit.ly has not received any threats of such action. Secondly, every bit.ly is also a j.mp – like a mirror. While that is one way there is redundancy, the engineers at bit.ly do a great job to make sure there is uptime and links keep working forever.
Not at all discouraging you starting your own shortening service. Just keep in mind there is work involved as well as plenty of scripts out there to set one up. Mainly I wanted to let people know that bit.ly is quite safe and growing exponetially with it’s different services – bit.ly, bitly.Pro, and paid Enterprise offerings for big companies like NY Times, TechCrunch, Huffington Post, etc..
Thanks for letting me post this comment, and I’m glad to see your shortener work fine btw – http://msol.us/1 🙂
@RexDixon Thanks Rex, ironically this post ended up providing me with a lot more context on “controlling home base” than I anticipated when I started. With due respect I do think bit.ly is an awesome service I just think they may have inadvertently made a poor choice of primary TLD. This problem is something I hadn’t really considered as a owner of a number of non .com and non US-based TLD domain names until recently either. I think the best thing bit.ly could do is start pushing a .us name as default to avoid future issues. Of course hindsight is 20/20, I don’t fault them (you?) for the decision in any way.
I hope you’ll consider my proposed .us TLD name, are you the head honcho at Bit.ly? I didn’t even realize you were involved with them until today. I know we’ve been connected on Amplify for a while, it is always a pleasure to converse. Thanks for joining the discussion.
If I had deep pockets I would definitely not hesitate to partner with bit.ly, I’d love to follow up with you about the service so I can clarify the options if you have a few minutes maybe we can chat some time soon. Be well my friend – Joe
@hackmanj Not the head honcho at all, nowhere close – but I’m like the man on the other side of the curtain to use a wizard of oz reference. Drop me a line there directly and I can fwd your ideas on to the powers that be. rex [at] bit [dot] ly work to reach me there. You can also leave suggestions in our Uservoice forums found here http://bit.ly/pvNq – which I’ll approve or deny depending upon what you say. 🙂
@hackmanj Great, looking forward to it!
@RexDixon Ok I posted the suggestion at the Uservoice forum here is the link: http://msol.us/bitlysuggest 😉
Great post Joe. I’ve been somewhat confused by the url shortening options available with some of the projects I’ve recently been involved with. I had not given much thought to the security or stability of these services. So your DIY suggestion is timely. I think I will give it a shot – or at least put it on the list.
@RickHendershot Hi Rick, the url shortening options have become pretty extensive these days. I think there is an added level of security knowing that you are the only one generating the links. I had not considered that until yesterday myself after seeing that the goo.gl shortener was being used to proliferate viruses on Twitter here is the article – http://msol.us/5.
I’ll be producing a screencast showing how to do everything with YOURLS. Stay tuned….
Thanks for joining the conversation,
Joe
@hackmanj @RickHendershot Just wanted to add that if you follow my Twitter stream @RexDixon – I have been warning people daily about the goo.gl issues. We at bit.ly provide several ways to report spam/phishing/virus urls, but goo.gl apparently hasn’t thought of that yet.That is one thing you must keep in mind about creating your own shortener service, if it’s just for you great – but – if you start to let others use it, don’t put it past certain groups to hijack your domain and start using it as a base for their spamming frenzy.
@RexDixon @RickHendershot excellent point Rex about your self hosted service. If you (or your hosting company) don’t keep Apache, MySQL, etc up to date you could quickly become a source of bad links (and a lot more!). I would not advocate sharing beyond perhaps very tight knit working groups. Also to further the point YOURLS itself could be compromised, this would be more likely should it really start to take off. Of course if it does take off it also benefits from more community support and that could offset the risks. Thanks for your comment. Joe
Sorry in advance if this is boring beyond measure for readers, but I have an SEO question that I wonder whether anyone would care to tackle.
Here is the scenario.
Mr Z owns domains ‘A’ and ‘B’.
Site ‘A’ is the URL shortener domain. It is a bare-bones site with a couple of short posts about site ‘B’ and a couple of links to site ‘B’.
Site B is the site that Mr Z is interested in promoting.
All the shortened links via site ‘A’ are by default dofollow and they are about posts etc, on site ‘B’.
What SEO benefit is there or could there be to site A and/or site B arising out of this arrangement?
@photographworks rather than answer this myself I will ask @DaliBurgado to take a look at it. She is much more SEO savvy than I am. 🙂
@photographworks Hey There Photgraphworks,
Well you found someone that finds this stuff riveting. Overall, shortened links don’t provide much SEO value. However, if we have our own shortener and the links on Site A are “dofollow” (which is not normally the case with most shortners), then they should pass ‘link juice’ to site B (the site we want to promote) and they will have some SEO benefit. How much? I don’t think it’s going to be a big difference, especially with the site being bare bones. I would also recommend a customized vanity link for the shortened URL linking to the post that is being shortened. IE if this post is the one being shortened by Joe’s shortener it would be something like “msol.us/urlshortner” instead of “msol.us/123.”
Also if we are talking about the SEO value of any shortener, the main concern with any URL shortener is that the short URLs may not be 301 Redirects. A 301 redirect says that the URL requested (the short URL) has “permanently” moved to the long address. If it’s a permanent redirect, search engines finding will credit all those links to the long URL.
Hope that helps!
Dali
@DaliBurgado @photographworks Thank you Dali, your advice is very useful!
Now that is a great idea 🙂
@nicklewis Glad you like it Nick, thanks for reading and commenting. Have a good day. Joe
@RickHendershot Not sure if this will help but I did put together a couple of videos and another post showing how to create it and just general use of YOURLS: http://msol.us/howtoyourls