Posted on May 7, 2009 - by Wayne Sutton

How to launch your own TinyURL service using WordPress. Yes, I have one too: s1w.com

As you know the conversations about TinyURL services have really taken off the last few weeks. We have seen reports about bit.ly raised $2 million in funding, the diggbar launches with tons of controversy and just yesterday Twitter ditched TinyURL for bit.ly. The bit.ly team must be either real excited or real nervous about their future, either way congrats to them. Also a new custom TinyURL service called Awe.sm just launched that provides custom url and statics for your own domain name at $99.00 a year. But what if you wanted to launch your own TinyURL service for let’s say, the cost of a new domain name $7.99, one hour and another wordpress install? That’s what I’ve done with the help of a few blog post. Here are the links for your reading and the outcome.

Instructions – Installing Your Own WordPress-Based DIY TinyURL In < 1 Hour
The results from following the instructions from the link above:
I have http://s1w.us domain name which stands for Short ones by Wayne. that auto redirects to socialwayne.com
I have a PressThis bookmarklet that creates a custom TinyURL using s1w.us, example: http://s1w.us/twtconf is from http://socialwayne.com/2009/05/05/twitterconferences/
I have a wordpress login to monitor stats using WP-ShortStat and Wassup.

If you’re not familiar with FTP, PHP or customizing wordpress I suggest that you hire someone (hint) if you would like to create your own TinyURL service using the option above. Another option for WordPress users is the RevCanonical plugin. RevCanonical “generates a short url for your pages, as well as adding link shortening discovery.” For example by installing RevCanonical my default post url: http://socialwayne.com/2009/05/05/twitterconferences/ was shorten to http://socialwayne.com/pin . You’ll also need a bookmarklet called Shorten to display the custom RevCanonical URL.

For bit.ly and wordpress users, the creator of RevCanonical has a plugin called TweetMe that will auto create a bit.ly URL or use your own domain’s RevCanonical url and send a tweet for each new post. This seems to work well versus using TweetSuit or TwitterTools to auto send a tweet when you publish a new blog post.

Corvida asked on FriendFeed: “What’s URL shortener do you use?” My response was bit.ly and idek.net now I can add my own TinyURL service to the list, http://s1w.us

Some of you may be asking why create your own TinyURL service? For me it was, I wanted more control over my links, I thought it was good for SEO and sharing on twitter and I thought it was a super geek cool thing to do. But here’s a blog post called: 10 Reasons To “Roll Your Own” TinyURL Using WordPress, if that’s not good enough for you.

The only thing left for me to figure out is how to add my custom s1w.us or RevCanonical url to my post like TechCrunch has (see image below).

More links about creating your own TinyURL service:
Create Your Own Short URL and Keep the Branding to Yourself
URL Shortening Hinting
la petite url

Have you created your own TinyURL service or thought about it? Did you ever think TinyURLs would be this big?

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