Today, we’re very pleased to announce the launch of our new publicly accessible, branded URL shortening service.
Taking advantage of the latest in URL shortening technologies and metrics functionality, we can now provide you with a super-short, ultra-convenient way to share those long links with your friends, family or colleagues, across Twitter, Facebook … (and more!)
For quite a long time now, some of you may be aware that we’ve operated the short domain rfly.co to pass along the latest content to you, our readers. However, following the introduction of this short domain, many of you have contacted us over the last several months and asked why you yourself can’t use this service to create your own short URLs.
While we’ll be reserving rfly.co for internal company use going forward, we took the decision to create a catchy alternative, in the hope that some of you will find the service useful.
Meet, RFLY.IT.
Short, simple, and quick to remember – RFLY.IT couldn’t be easier to use. Starting today, you can head to RFLY.IT‘s mobile-optimized frontpage and enter your long URL, then hit “Go.”
That’s it! – You can let us handle the rest.
Smart enough to intelligently keep track of how many times your link has been accessed and viewed by others, RFLY.IT is also capable of keeping track of which short URL is assigned to which long URL, ensuring there’s never two short links pointing to the same awesome place on the web.
If your previously shortened long URL is re-entered into RFLY.IT‘s shortening engine, we’ll sniff it out as an existing URL and serve your uniquely assigned short URL, allowing you to track the metrics of a single URL however many times you wish.
Tracking Metrics
To track the metrics associated with your unique short url, you just use the format: http://rfly.it/stats/&url=YOURSHORTURLHERE. Pointing your browser to http://rfly.it/stats/&url=6 – (for example) – will serve up stats for http://rfly.it/6, which redirects to the long URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk.
API
As detailed in our API Documentation, there are two parameters through which you can remotely call information from RFLY.IT using the GET request (JSON Output).
These include:
url – This parameter creates a short URL for your URL (site), and will return the following: id (unique id), url (site url), date (date and time) and the short (shortened url) value.
search – This parameter requests the URL (site) information such as id (unique id), url (site url), alias (alias or custom URL name), hits (hits from visitors), date (date and time), short (shortened url), and the stats (url stats page) value.
Example API call – (Shortened: http://www.razorianfly.com)
Bookmarklet
While we’re still working on fleshing out the service to our exacting standards, we’ve managed to create a simple bookmarklet script which you can add to your browser by clicking and dragging this link to your browser’s toolbar. This script will allow you to shorten the page you’re currently on, with the script returning the id (unique id), url (site url), date (date and time) and the short (shortned url) value.
Final Word
We really hope you like RFLY.IT as much as we’ve enjoyed tweaking it over this past week. We can’t wait for you to start using it. In fact, if you hurry, you might even become the first to have a 1 character long suffix, meaning your whole short url (including slashes) will be just 9 characters long!
Hows that for short?
Not to mention being able to grab your custom URL ending of choice …
Excluding slashes and the need for http:// and www. (because we don’t force you to use either of those), you’ll be looking at a shortened URL of just 8 characters, simply perfect for Twitter’s 140-character limit.
You’ll want to read both our Content Policy and Privacy Policy before getting started. Once you’ve done that though, a whole new short(er) world awaits you.
RFLY.IT, today.
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