I’m re-announcing http://ewerl.com here with some new features added. I put together a couple screen shots of the functionality over at the website’s “about” page, but I’ll outline the highlights here:
1. User accounts – a lot of people wanted to be able to log in and keep track of their Ewerls. This is done.
2. Stats tracking – the previous version had this, and it’s been split in to two levels, a free and a paid-for version. The free version is probably fine for most people – it’ll show you the number of times your Ewerl has been used. The pay version ($9.95 per year with a 3 day free trial) will show you time/date usage, IP, user agent, referring URLs, and a city/state/location when possible.
3. WordPress plugin – You can now have your WordPress posts convert your links to Ewerls automatically.
Upcoming features:
1. RSS – planning to bring back some level of RSS functionality again. Moving to this v2 meant I had to put RSS on the back burner for now. Let me know if you want it.
2. Email – daily email usage reports. I’d started this on v1, but had to shelve it to get the rest of this out.
3. Backwards compatibility for the previous API calls. There weren’t too many people using them yet, so this was something else that fell lower in priority. If you want/need that back, let me know.
Go try it out and let me know what you think!
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Why don’t ecommerce companies offer tinyurl-like services?
I just saw someone tweet that they’d received something in the post, and linked to a URL shortener service. It redirected to Amazon. Now I realize that Twitter is a pretty new service, but with mobile rising, I think we’ll see a need for short URLs more and more. Couple that with the slightly extra privacy you get with a shorter URL (someone needs to actually visit the link to know you’re pointing to furry handcuffs, for example), and the mindshare Amazon would keep by having “amazon.com/6hjw89eh9e7hds”, and the extra metrics they’d be able to capture with that (add a user key in the short URL) and this makes sense to me. The top of every Amazon product page would have a “Short URL” property available to cut/paste/whatever.
Someone should embed this in their ecommerce system to acknowledge and emrace Twitter, Plurk and the coming wave of microblogging platforms.
I'm currently working on a book for web freelancers, covering everything you need to know to get started or just get better. Want to stay updated? Sign up for my mailing list to get updates when the book is ready to be released!
