Top
Welcome

Hi, welcome to my blog. Feel free to follow me on twitter or RSS. You can also subscribe to my webcandy newsletter below. Thanks for popping in..

Like my site?

Add to Technorati Favorites
Articles
« Let your followers churn | Main | Defining your internet presence »
Monday
Jun152009

Make a public URL unique

*Moving this over from my old blog*

I was using bit.ly the other day and I noticed they reuse shortend urls for conversions they've already done. If you log into their site they give you a new unique one it seems (I wasn't logged in at the time). To cut a long story short, I wanted to make the long url I was converting unique, so that they wouldn't give me back a re-used one.

The solution is pretty simple. Just add a unique query string to the url and everything should still work fine. Here's an example:

If you're trying to link to:    http://www.davesumter.com/

But they keep giving you back:    http://bit.ly/18u6Jv

Then add something like this to the end of the original url:

http://www.davesumter.com/?shorten=please

This is useful if you're trying to track the number of hits on that link accurately. Note, if the url already has a "?" in it then you need to replace it with a "&".  (eg. &shorten=please). And it doesn't really matter what you type after it. You can even leave out the equals sign in some cases.

AuthorDave | Comment2 Comments |

PrintView Printer Friendly Version

EmailEmail Article to Friend

PostPost a New Comment

Enter your information below to add a new comment.

My response is on my own website »
Author Email (optional):
Author URL (optional):
Post:
 
Some HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>

Notify me of follow-up comments via email.