Boffin + Wonk
Andy Kaplan-Myrth

Andy is an internet policy advisor with the Government of Canada, with a background in technology law and an interest in how collaborative and social technologies are reshaping industries, governments, societies and the world. See more from me at http://kaplan-myrth.ca.

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February 23rd, 1:45am 0 comments

A better bookmarklet for bit.ly

There are lots of online tools for shortening URLs, but one of the best is bit.ly. Not only does it shorten URLs, it keeps track of the URLs you have shortened and shows stats on them. Best of all, bit.ly lets you pick your own keyword to act as the short URL.

Unfortunately, the bookmarklet bit.ly provides does not take advantage of this keyword feature. I've cooked up this unofficial bookmarklet that will prompt you for a keyword before creating the short URL. Just make a link in your bookmarks with the following code and use it when you're on a page you want to shorten!

javascript:keyword=prompt('Keyword:');location.href='http://bit.ly/?url='+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+'&keyword='+keyword 

(btw, I wish I could make a bookmarklet link that you could drag to your bookmarks, but posterous.com won't embed javascript links -- no doubt for safety reasons)

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