1) I found a stats plugin to use that works well with the REUS install after a few custom tweaks. Some minor modifications to the database calls and the reporting page to allow for more tracking on recent links, and the WP-Shortstats plugin has been performing flawlessly. I have included it with custom changes in the new REUS .zip package (link at end of this post).

Best thing is, the stats data belongs to YOU, no one can hold it hostage (unlike e.g. Budurl.com, which wants to only allow you to download your stats with a paid account). Also note that many 3rd party services’ stats solutions tend to lack good comparative screens, overviews, or ordering by e.g. "all-time highest clicks", and so forth:

With REUS you can watch your clicks roll in in near real-time as shown here (you’ll have to hit refresh in the "Admin > Dashboard > Shortstats" screen to update). No fancy graphics like world maps, etc., but the information you really need to assess the success of your links:

2) Using your own short domain looks custom and gets attention. As you can tell from the above screenshot, people get curious about your custom/novel shorterner URL, and navigate to the "/" root quite often on first use. To make this useful/profitable for you, one key manual update that needs to be made to the "/wordpress/wp-content/themes/redirect_engine/index.php" file is to set up redirection of "/" to your blog or other page of your choice. 

So in my example an inquisitive user would type in "http://3on.us/", which for my set-up redirects them to the original REUS post on my blog.

3) You can create links that you completely determine the URL appearance of, both as to the domain (which will seem pretty custom vs. the publicly available services), as well as to the link extension, which can now be at least semi-sensible:

Keep in mind that a non-sense link is harder to process for the brain, and "a confused mind always says No!" as they say. So people are less likely to click. Meaningful URLs do have higher click-through rates from what I can tell so far, and marketing savants such as StomperNet’s Brad Fallon seem to agree (and guys like him test everything!).

Here is another bit of proof. This screen cap is a stat taken from celebrity Internet marketer Joel Comm’s TwitPwr.com URL shortening service:

What it shows is that the total average click-through for all TwitPwr.com links is just under 8 (about 160k / 20k), and his list of user includes some pretty illustrious company with largish follower counts. As my own stats screenshot from above shows, my REUS links have been pulling well above that on an average of about 1,000 followers over the last 4 weeks:

147 links have been clicked 3438 times on Twitter and a few other sources, for an average of just under 24 clicks per link. Not bad (and yes, I did subtract out the "/" root inquiries and robots.txt hits; and robots.txt disallows all further search engine bot access).

Granted there are many variables that come into play that make a simple 1-to-1 comparison difficult, including the fact that Twitter users may be slightly more reluctant to click on TwitPwr.com links due to the slightly, shall we say, "promotional" nature of that service. But the numbers are still pretty convincing, especially given the follower advantage for many TwitPwr users.

4) URLs can be shortened further on the fly due to…

…Wordpress’ post slug tolerance, e.g. "3on.us/roll-tinyurl" will still work as "3on.us/roll-t" in case you had to save even more space to fit into 140 characters on Twitter. By the way, if a duplicate match should arise due to lobbing off too much from a link extension, Wordpress/REUS will default to the earliest URL/post found:

5) Just about all of the other URL shortener Bookmarklets disallow for creating custom extensions, even if the main service does! To get this feature, you will have to manually copy/paste the URL to be shortened into their home page, etc. Try it out yourself with e.g. tr.im, their bookmarklet does not appear to allow for customizing the link the way that the tr.im Web interface does, and it cannot be edited after the initial save.

Whereas the REUS Wordpress-based solution leverages Wordpress’ own "Press This" bookmarklet to make custom extensions without copy/paste possible (as described in the original post and the new install instructions).

6) By owning your own Tinyurl service, you know that your links/stats won’t one day go out of business (in this economy, you never know…), just as long as YOU are still in business. And you can back up all of your links and stats, and could even run them locally from your own computer, just in case you were forced to give up your main hosting account and could no longer afford the $10/year for the add-on domain used for your REUS install (let’s just assume right now that that will NEVER happen…).

7) To recap some of the benefits already described in the original post, with REUS you can create links as short or even shorter than the shortest http://is.gd etc. link, because you could choose to have the link extension only be one character, e.g. "http://3on.us/x" (limited supply of those of course).

Some of the services already waste an extra 2 characters or more in the domain name, e.g. "budurl.com", "twurl.nl", "twitpwr.com", etc. With REUS, if you get yourself a 3 character .us domain to install on, you will have up to 16 charaters for the link extension and still be within Twitter’s 30 character link length limit.

I’ve also found that I was able to quickly commit to memory some of my most-used links with shorter/memorable names, so that I could easily type them in manually in certain situations, for example in some blog comments.

8) If you are using marketing related link tracker services such as aWeber.com or 1shoppingcart.com, you can in principle use your new REUS to replace those as well. For that type of use you would also not be constrained by the extension length as much (e.g. in Email), and could use even more descriptive link extensions, e.g. "http://3on.us/grab-your-free-copy-here".

9) You are free of the various idiosyncracies of other 3rd party shortener services. For example, both Tinyurl and is.gd truncate your "#[anchor name/id]" on-page-anchor entensions (not sure why), like those used to direct straight to a specific comment on a blog post page.

10) I have built a character counter into the custom "press-this.php" file (called by the "Press-This" bookmarklet), that comes with the REUS distribution. This makes it faster to create exactly the right link length (after I found myself doing a lot of counting initially) that will still display without Twitter abbreviating your link with an "…" ellipsis. As already mentioned, in the case of my example domain "3on.us", I have exactly 16 characters left to stay within Twitters 30 character limit.

All while typically having the link extension prepopulated with candidate terms and phrases from the post/page Title (if present in the Title tag) that can easily be edited down to the desired length.

—-

So, 10 good reasons to get your own REUS install. It’s completely free, no strings attached. If you use Twitter and care about the links you post there, you really might want to give it a whirl.

Here is the link for the updated REUS distribution:

http://businessmindhacks.com/v/redirect_engine.zip

Here is the link to the original REUS post again, as well as a link to an "install instructions only, no rationales" version.

Enjoy!

—

OK, haven’t posted in a little while, in part because I had been working on some pretty cool techy stuff. Here is the first result from it:

Have you been using URL shortening/redirection services like TinyURL, is.gd, etc. in order to send lengthy links to friends in a shorter format, or to fit them into the space-constricted posting fields on micro-blogging services such as Twitter?

If you have, and you’re a marketer, you have probably been wishing that you could track the number of clicks on those links you post to Twitter, or improve the appearance of the link text, etc.

While there are some services available that allow you to do some of that, such as Tweetburner.com which creates a trackable “http://twurl.nl/…” style link, they almost all have one drawback or another, e.g. they 1) don’t allow for custom link text (Tweetburner), 2) sometimes truncate your original link’s # anchors if present (is.gd), 3) don’t allow for tracking, 4) want your Twitter credentials to allow for tracking, and 5) they all end up kind of owning your data.

So I figured, if there was a fast/cheap solution to set the same thing up for yourself, so that you control all of the variables, that would be a good thing, no? You will see in a moment how it can be accomplished using a basic Wordpress 2.7 blogging software installation. Now you’ll likely still use other services to auto-shorten links as well, but when you want to make it count, and want your shortened link on your terms, I bet you’ll like what I have cooked up for you.

The Instructions

Let’s take it step-by-step. Note that I won’t get too in depth with basic technical explanations, I’ll assume that you are familiar with FTP and have already done a standard Wordpress install before. If you’re new to Wordpress, I’d recommend hiring someone to do these steps for you, they should bill you for at most 1 hour as you will see.

I am posting the expected time to complete with each step:

1) You will need to buy a .us domain to install as an add-on domain with one of your existing hosting accounts. I used a http://Bluehost.com account for this, they have reasonable prices and service, but use any hosting/domain provider you would like. Note that it’s not worth getting a separate hosting account just for this engine, and an add-on domain should only cost about $8-10 per year.

Search for short, 3-4 character .us domains, as you’ll obviously want to save space. I found that there are still plenty of 3 character semi- to non-sensical domain names available with one or two numerals in the name, e.g. I picked 3on.us for my test case.

Once purchased, …

… install the domain in your hosting account’s domain manager as an “Add-on domain”, which should also create a new directory under your public_html directory, in my case I simply chose “3on”. This is what the process looked like in a CPanel hosting account:

— Time: 10 minutes (depending on how long you search around for a domain you like :).

2) Now simply download a copy of Wordpress (WP) 2.7, and install it on the newly created directory, so that the directory structure will read “/public_html/3on/wordpress/…” (structure shown below is how it should look in your FTP client program, obviously with your own directory name)

Go through a normal WP 2.7 install including setting up the database and editing wp-config.php, if you’re using Fantastico to automate this, just make sure that the install directory is the new one you want.

Either way, make sure you select option “no search engines” during the install, as this will avoid your stats getting falsified by frequent search engine hits on your redirect/link shortening engine. The “Settings > Privacy” panel should later look as shown below, verify and if necessary adjust after the installation:

— Time: 10 minutes.

3) Upon install, log into the WP admin panel, and edit “Settings > General” as shown in the screenshot below (obviously with your own domain name).

You’ll also need to do one more manual step to copy the “/wordpress/index.php” into the new domain’s root directory, i.e. “/3on/index.php” and change the path inside the file as described in the link right next to “Blog Address URL”:

Enter the address here if you want your blog homepage to be different from the directory you installed WordPress.

The point being that you need your blog to respond at the domain level without any further path, i.e. “http://3on.us/” and NOT “http://3on.us/blog/”, etc. which would obviously be counterproductive to our link shortening agenda.

— Time: 2 minutes.

3) Now that Wordpress is installed, go to “Settings > Permalinks”, and select “Custom Structure”, placing “/%postname%” into the field by that option. This will append your redirect “post” names directly to the domain, e.g. “http://3on.us/testlink” — Time: 1 minute.

— Time: 1 minute.

4) We’re now coming to the heart of the matter the modifications needed to have your Wordpress install act as a redirect engine. I’ve packaged the necessary files as a Wordpress Theme, download them here:

http://businessmindhacks.com/v/redirect_engine.zip

Then extract the .zip file, and FTP upload the “redirect_engine” folder into your “/wordpress/wp-content/themes/” directory as you would any other theme. Activate the theme by going to “Appearance > Themes”, then selecting “Wordpress REUS” by clicking on the theme’s screenshot or link, and finally clicking “Activate Wordpress REUS” in the upper right hand corner.

If you are interested in the code that makes the redirection work, look at the “single.php” file. It’s really quite simple. Also note that “page.php” contains the same code, so you can in principle use pages to create redirect links as well. However, you won’t be able to use the “Press This” bookmarklet we’re about to discuss to do so, as it defaults to “Post”. Use the “Pages > Add” menu instead if you’re so inclined (e.g. to keep certain links separate from your everyday links).

— Time: 5 minutes.

5) Now that the redirection is in place, we just want to make it a bit more convenient. This is where leveraging Wordpress’ “Press This” bookmarklet feature comes into play:

First, go to the “Tools > Tools” menu, and there locate the “Press This” bookmarklet link as shown. Then drag & drop it onto your Bookmarks Toolbar (in FireFox, which is the only browser I’ve tested this in, but IE should work similarly).

— Time: 1 minute.

6) You are now ready to test the new bookmarklet. Simply go to any web page you would like to shorten the URL for, and then click on the bookmarklet button in your Bookmarks Toolbar (obviously that Toolbar needs to be visible):

You will see a popup as follows (and may have to give your new wordpress site permission to open pop-ups, you’ll want to do this):

Note that you will have to be logged into your Wordpress install as “admin”, else you’ll be asked to log in first. Change the “post” title at the top to your desired link name, like in the following example (the post’s “slug”, which is the actual term for the link extension in Wordpress, is created automatically; note that any uppercase letters will be converted to lowercase and any spaces turned into a hyphen (-):

Then press the “Publish” button in the right bottom corner of the pop-up. Done! Your shortened redirect link has been created.

Note that the custom code for “single.php” arranges it so that the URL will automatically be parsed out of the “post” content (the live link shown above), while the link text (e.g. “Twitter Raising Money…” ) will be used as a post title/description in case you choose to pass this shortened URL on to Twitter. You can change this descriptive text in the form shown above, just make sure that you don’t accidentally delete the entire link (and thereby the underlying URL).

You will see the following output:

Now the “TwitterThis!” option won’t be visible to you yet until you do one more custom change to Wordpress I’ll describe in a moment, but you will already be able to copy & paste the newly created short link by right-clicking on “View Post” and selecting “Copy Link Location” (“Copy Shortcut” in IE):

You will also be able to see you newly created “post” that is the basis of your short link in the “Posts > Edit” screen, where you can do the same copy & paste maneuver as above from the “View” option that appears as you hover over the individual post row in the table:

Or click the “View” link to test that your redirect actually works.

Note that you can also rename the bookmarklet itself in your browser’s Bookmark Toolbar by right-clicking, selecting “Properties”, and changing the “Name” to your desired option, e.g. “MyShortLink” in case you’re using the “Press This” bookmarklet for other Wordpress blog installations or yours.

OK, this was the long version of testing, let’s say it takes you a few minutes the first time. Once you have done it several times, this should take you only about 30 seconds anymore.

— Time: 3 minutes.

7) Now comes the last step to enable the “TwitterThis!” option on the “Press This” result pop-up as was shown above. Locate the file “press-this.php” in the directory “/wordpress/wp-admin” and rename it to “press-this.php.old” or similar. Now go to the REUS theme directory “/wordpress/wp-content/themes/redirect_engine” and find the “press-this.php” file there. Then copy that file into the “/wordpress/wp-admin” directory.

Done. I tried to find a more elegant solution for this step, but there didn’t seem to be any as far as adding the extra bit of code through the Wordpress action model, etc. If you know of a way that this could have been done in a more automated way, please contact me. Thanks.

Alright, here is what you will see when you click on “TwitterThis!” in the “Press This” pop-up (assuming that you are already logged into Twitter, else it will prompt you to log in before passing you on):

Basically, the status field will show the link text which will typically be the linked post’s title for most blogs, as well as your brand-new shortened link with the readable extension. Here is what the Twitter status (the “tweet”) will look like after you hit “update”:

As you can see, Twitter did NOT alter the link itself in any way, this will be the case as long as you keep it at a total of 30 characters or less, else it may be adjusted with an ellipsis (“…”) or turned into a Tinyurl.com style link by Twitter.

In my example, we have 7 characters for “http://”, 7 for the “3on.us/” domain name plus forward slash, leaving 16 characters for the link extension (the post name as described above). “twittervaluation” is exactly 16 characters as it happens, so we know it works. When I tested “twitter-valuation” (17 characters) the link had a bit cut off at the end by Twitter with the “…” ellipsis when the actual tweet was displayed.

— Time: 3 minutes.

So what did we gain?

First, by my count, the whole thing should have only taken about 35 minutes or so. If you are not as handy with Wordpress installs, FTP, etc. and want to hire someone to do this whole bit for you, my guess is that they’d have a hard time justifying more than 1 hour of billed time.

Second, you now have a completely flexible redirection engine / URL shortening (REUS, kind of sappy, I know) device, that

1) Can create links 2 characters shorter than even the shortest http://is.gd link, because you could choose to have the link extension only be one character, e.g. “http://3on.us/x” (obviously you’ll have only a limited supply of those…). Note also that is.gd does truncate your “#” on page anchor entensions, like those used to direct straight to a specific comment on a blog post page. Score another one for REUS…

2) Can create links that you completely determine the URL appearance of, both as to the domain (which will seem pretty custom vs. the publicly available services), as well as to the link extension, which can now be at least be semi-sensible.

If you are used to using the link tracker services of aWeber.com or 1shoppingcart.com, or have seen those in list emails sent to you, you can in principle use your new REUS to replace those as well. For that use you would also not be constrained by the extension length as much, and could use even more descriptive link text, e.g. “http://3on.us/grab-your-free-copy-here”.

3) I am working on a stats solution using an already available “Wordpress Stats” plugin as we speak, I will update you as soon as I’ve verified everything. Once that is in place, you will have stats for your REUS. In the meantime, you can use the Stats tools available from your hosting account, such as “Webalizer” or “Awstats” in CPanel, just turn them on for the new domain and you should be able to view your click-throughs. Either way, the data belongs to YOU.

I would hope you agree: Not too bad…

The “theme” is being submitted to Wordpress.org later today, I will keep you posted when it officially becomes available from their site.

UPDATE: OK, seems like this is a little over the Wordpress.org Theme Team’s heads, they didn’t know what to make of the REUS “theme” and rejected it (so far) on the grounds that “This is way too much work to setup a theme.” Even though the only truly exceptional step is the replacement of the “press-this.php” with our custom version. Oh well, no big deal, it is small enough (about 30KB zipped) to easily host from my own hosting account. Here is the link again:

http://businessmindhacks.com/v/redirect_engine.zip

In happier news, I found a stats plugin to use that works relatively well out of the box to get some statistics going for your REUS install. It’s appropriately named “WP-ShortStats” and can be downloaded here. I will talk to the creators and see if they’d like to make a small modification to the reporting page (“Dashboard > ShortStat”) to allow for more tracking on each link, i.e. showing all of the referrers. Or else I’ll make some custom adjustments myself when I find the time. I’ll keep you posted.

Related to what I wrote near the beginning, it turns out that “Budurl.com” kind of holds your click-through stats hostage, you can only download them with a paid account. One more reason to use REUS…