URLy – URL Sharer for Android

Like a lot of people, I use my phone to share links over Twitter, email, SMS, etc. I have my own YOURLs-based link shortener running on this server, but typically I just use whatever built in shortener the app I’m running uses. This finally annoyed me to the point where I decided to see if there was an easy way to route around the bit.lys of the world.

Enter free Android app URLy. URLy bills itself as a “multi-purpose URL sharer” and is a very slick way to share links, photos, etc. to literally dozens of social networking sites, email, etc. But for my purposes its main advantage is that among the 40 or so URL shorteners it lets users choose from, it throws in support for custom YOURLs installations.

All I had to do was go into the settings, enter the URL for my YOURLs API script and the signature token and it just worked. URLy will let you assign a custom short link to any URL, and has more configuration options than you can shake a stick at. (If every app on Android were this high quality …)

 

YOURLS – Self-Hosted Link Shortener

There are a number of open source, self-hosted link shortener packages out there, but YOURLS (Your Own URL Shortener) is by far the best one I’ve come across. Along with it being extremely simple to install, it is also being actively maintained. The developers are currently working on the next version which will include more advanced statistics reporting.

I was bored one night and so decided to register a domain name, lnks.tv, and set up a private link shortner using YOURLS. Everything went smoothly and it is nice to be in control of the whole link shortening process and especially be able to reserve specific links that would almost certainly already be taken at public sites (for example, I can link to this site in Twitter or elsewhere simply by using http://lnks.tv/brian).