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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.

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