Tech Note: Our Own URL-Shortening Domain
It’s the Internet equivalent of the vanity license plate, but I couldn’t resist. When you use our little blue Twitter buttons to retweet a post from LGF on Twitter, either from a front page article or an LGF Page, the link to the post inside your tweet will now use our extra-super-special custom URL-shortening domain, lgf.bz.
This feature is provided by the well-known URL shortening site, bit.ly. Last December they launched a service called bit.ly Pro, which lets you use your own short domain name to point to pages on your site. Lots of mainstream news sites are using this service; for example, the New York Times uses the domain nyti.ms.
I was lucky enough to find a nice short domain name that relates to Little Green Footballs, lgf.bz, and promptly snapped it up. It took a little bit of messing around with A records and CNAME records, and some minor changes to the LGF Blog codebase, but we’re set up and functioning with lgf.bz as our short URL domain. We’re branded like the big boys now.