Want your URL Shortener? Buy a Domain and Use Bit.ly, like Techcrunch and New York Times
With the diffusion of Twitter and other social sharing communities there is a lot of buzz over URLs shortening. Every major company wants to have its own URLs shortening domain: Google (goo.gl), TechCrunch (tcrn.ch), New York Times (nyti.ms), FourSquare (4sq.com), Fox News (fxn.ws), Delicious (icio.us), Bing (fa.il), …
Did they all really setup some highly reliable servers and databases to do that? The answer is no.
Most of them just bought a short domain and setup their web server to redirects all the requests to Bit.ly. Some examples:
TechCrunch: http://tcrn.ch/cNYWLR -> http://bit.ly/cNYWLR
New York Times: http://nyti.ms/dzy2b7 -> http://bit.ly/dzy2b7
Fox News: http://fxn.ws/cH1usB -> http://bit.ly/cH1usB
Now that you know the trick, building your own URL shortening service may be easier than you thought. And you get statistics too, simply adding a plus (+) at the end of the URL (e.g., http://fxn.ws/cH1usB+) or using Bit.ly API.
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