This is the second in a new series on my blog, “Make Your Blog Better” (MYBB) where I’ll stretch my nerdy wings and share tech/blogging information that will improve the quality of your blog. Check out the previous MYBB post here, and the MYBB-Minibite here!

Do you ever use URL shortening sites like

• bit.ly
• tinyURL
• or the proprietary shorteners like those in facebook or twitter (and their respective 3rd party apps)?

With the surging popularity of microblogging sites, and the fact that keystrokes are at an unprecedented premium, shortening long URLS is something that has become second nature to most of us in the social world.

I’ve been wanting to make sure that the links I share on twitter and Facebook are easily identifiable as legitimately from ME, and tiny URLS have changed the game in that regard. Someone in your stream says,

“OMG, Check out this LINK: http://bit.ly/gxxEeQ” And you, (trusting your friend) click on this now unidentifiable link and the next thing you know, Rick Astley is jumping out in all his glory, and you done been RickRoll’d. (Yes that is a live Rick Roll. LOVE it.) or worse… clicked on a spam link, because your friend let their fb get hacked by clicking on some random facebook application that promises electronic eskimo kisses or something… (hey, we ALL have some of those fb friends, right?)

So, here’s how you can implement your own, customized URL shortening service using bit.ly pro.

Before you begin, here is what you need…

• the tiny domain you want to use. I’m hosted through godaddy, so I used their domain search functions to find one that suited me… my short domain is kels.es so all of the short links that I generate using this method will be kels.es/S0MEthIng. This is NOT free. I was able to get my domain for $13 bucks for a whole year. You don’t need any additional hosting, so that was the only expense.
• a bit.ly account.
• access to your DNS manager (which you access through your hosting panel- mine is godaddy)
• The ability to follow pretty basic instructions about changing things in your DNS manager, and perhaps a bit of experience in clicking around a bit to find the right way to edit simple values.

*click through to finish the tutorial*

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