Comments on: How To Create Personally Branded URL’s

By: Trevor Gerzen

Trevor Gerzen — Thu, 27 May 2010 01:20:30 +0000

Has anyone used the WP Lessn plugin for wordpress and ran into issues with fopen? I am stuck right now and am trying to find answers but with these sort of “Indie” tools there’s not often much documentation. Goes with the territory

By: Beau Giles

Beau Giles — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 16:28:04 +0000

Hi everyone,
I too went with Lessn over yourls for it’s simplicity and elegant interface – I wasn’t really too concerned with missing out on stats and other details.
However, a friend recently pointed me in the direction of Buttered URLs (http://jeremyknope.com/2009/08/30/buttered_urls/), a fork of Lessn.
Buttered URLs adds on support for basic stats (number of clicks, top referrers), as well as custom handles (eg, instead of bgil.es/1r pointing to my last.fm page, I could use bgil.es/lastfm).
And the best thing? It works just like Lessn, just run the upgrade script and it’ll add the necessary bits for stats without breaking your existing Lessn installation.

Hopefully this helps someone out.
- Beau

By: Waasys

Waasys — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 21:50:16 +0000

I always recomend everyone who is goin to launch a website to spend enough time om choosing the right domain name, beacuse this will greatly affect your reputation and popularity

By: Phil

Phil — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 11:12:50 +0000

Is it possible create your own shortener with stats that aren’t attached to mint? I might give this a go though mint can sometimes be a pain tbh and the data isn’t very archiveable.

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 15:33:31 +0000

Thanks Grace, ever since you mentioned your personal url shortner when we were talking about tweetie the other day I have been thinking about creating my own.

By: ryanve

ryanve — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 00:35:52 +0000

Thanks for the detailed info. One thing I do like about bit.ly is that everyone recognizes it, it doesn't look like spam, and it doesn't pop up with an annoying bar at the top of the screen. I might try lessn out with ryanve.com. It's short enough and that's what I always use as a username. Your further resources led me to find something related and useful—the WordPress plugin for su.pr that lets you customize a website's su.pr-shortened urls. I just installed in on my site e.g. http://virtualmusic.tv/HhvC. But the downside is that it only works when you shorten them through su.pr. It would integrate better if su.pr was one of the shortening options for tweetmeme button.

By: Design Informer

Design Informer — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 20:25:32 +0000

Grace, this is excellent. I definitely will look into creating my own for the Design informer.

By: Grace

Grace — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 18:28:10 +0000

@Chris I love Domai.nr but it wasn’t overly helpful in this situation. I ended up brainstorming a variety of names until I thought of using it with a sub-folder of H to make up my full name.

@Adian Thanks Adrian, that’s a great idea, once I have shortened a few more links I will make the table of links publicly viewable.

@Mike Go for it! Honestly it only took about an hour to put together, super easy but really fun

@Abraham Thanks for link to the Lessn Pepper, that’s a brill idea. Although I don’t actually have a Mint account, it’s certainly worth thinking about for the easy stat tracking.

@Sean Cheers Sean, appreciate your kind words. That is a neat little shortener as well!

@John Yourls is very good I would agree. I think it all depends on what you need, personally I love Lessn for it’s sheer simplicity, with a stats tracker I think it’s the perfect ‘starter’ package. Also Lessn now has an API.

By: John Girvin

John Girvin — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 17:06:27 +0000

After the tr.im roller coaster, I decided to host my own URL shortening service using Yourls on the http://girv.in domain. I don't mean to diss Lessn, but it wasn't what I needed. I went with Yourls as it came with a ready to use API that made a couple of tasks much easier. First, I hacked up a script to export my existing tr.im URLs to girv.in using the same shortcodes (I'm not sure there was much point in this actually!). Then I integrated girv.in with Wordpress to automatically send my new posts to Twitter complete with shortened URLs. Finally, like you, I built an index page to list all the URLs in my Yourls database.

By: Abraham Vegh

Abraham Vegh — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 16:47:37 +0000

Small correction: The Lessn Pepper can work with any configuration of Lessn and Mint, but it still requires Mint to view the statistics, although I’m sure someone could extract out the core components and make it independent (although I’m not sure how kindly Shaun would take to that).