aURL

Google now has its own URL Shortener for use with Google products. It is not currently available for broad consumer end use.  Here is the announcement on Google’s blog:
Making URLs shorter for Google Toolbar and FeedBurner

This weeks Tech Times newsletter from Sitepoint, Tech Times #253  – Host Your Own Short URL’s, is devoted to the topic of URL shortening. It looks at the recent near demise of tr.im and considers the implications of losing the history of your short url’s and takes a look at some options to host your own URL Shortener.

Create branded short links using your own URL shortening service like Coke. Check out this article at mashable.com – Should Your Brand Have Its Own URL Shortener

We still haven’t found a WordPress plugin that displays the list of URL services the way we want. After recently purchasing the latest edition of Kevin Yank’s “Build Your Own Database Driven Web Site Using PHP & MYSQL”, I’m seriously considering rebuilding this site using the techniques I will learn in the book. It is becoming clear to me that maintaining and posting the URL service list will be the main focus of the site, and as such it will be most important to develop the site with that in mind. Posts like this and the few previous ones are secondary to the overall purpose, but the nature of WordPress makes them the focal point. Expect more dramatic changes in the future.

URL shortening gets mentioned at Sitepoint in a post and an article about building your own URL Shortener with ColdFusion.

Check out these links:

1. Build Your Own URL Shortener
2. Get Shorty: Trim the Fat with ColdFusion

We found an interesting post on the TweetDeck blog about the URL Shortening Services they plan to support in their Twitter application. URL Shortening Services – TweetDeck’s posterous

Many of the comments to the post mention specific URL shortening services. We will be looking at them closely for new ones to add to our growing list of sites. We have a lot to add to our directory.

I have a growing list of sites providing URL related services to add to the directory. I’m searching for a good link manager to add to the site; either a Wordpress plugin or I’ll build one of my own. I installed a plugin called Link Library this morning which isn’t working quite the way I thought, so I will be looking at other alternatives.

If anyone knows a good plugin or a tutorial for constructing a directory in WordPress, please leave a comment. Also, if you know an efficient way of searching the WordPress Plugin Directory, I would like to hear it. I’m finding paging through all the possibilities a bit tedious.

A longtime user of Tiny URL, Brendon Sinclair, the editor of SitePoint’s Tribune newsletter has mentioned a newer URL trimming service called Tr.im. In his opinion it is a better service than the venerable Tiny URL. See his mention in the Tips and Tricks section of the April 23 edition of the Tribune.

Welcome to aURL. The site is just launched, but plenty of work is going on in the background.The look and feel of the site is a work in progress so expect it to change quite a bit for a while. 

We are gathering information for our URL Shortening and Redirection Services directory. There are lots out there, so we expect the directory to take a long time to build. One of the factors affecting this service niche is the availability of free, low cost, and homegrown programs to perform url shortening and redirection. Some of these services come and go in a short period of time. One of the articles I started with, written just over a year ago, listed quite a few sites that are already gone or replaced with one of those generic ad sites that catches some web traffic. So, job number one will be finding sites that are operational and continuing to ensure they are still in operation to make sure our directory is up to date.

For those interested in understanding these services a bit better or wanting to build your own, we will be finding tutorials about developing url shortening and redirection scripts, and listing sources of scripts to do the job.

Keep coming back. We expect to make regular updates starting very soon.