Well I finally got around to setting up my own link shortening domain today, trymy.info. The purpose of a link shortening service is pretty much what you would think it would be, it shortens the length of a link. For example http://www.mickwalmsley.com/blog/2011/06/14/juror-faces-prison-over-facebook-contact-with-former-defendant/ uses 107 characters while http://trymy.info/kKkX33 uses just 24 characters, which is useful when posting links to social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter that put a limit on the number of characters that can be used in a message.

The service takes advantage of the popular bit.ly service and uses their API. A full set of analytics such as how many times a link has been clicked on, the location of the person that clicked on the link, the time of the day that link has been clicked on and the referring site. It is very easy to configure and took me less than two minutes to complete the set up.

trymy.info may be a couple of characters longer than bit.ly but from the research I have conducted a lot of people are interested in using the service as they feel it has a more user friendly feel than the other link shortening services out there. From now on I will be using trymy.info as my link shortening service and I will also be making it available, free of charge, to any of my clients who wish to use it. If you would like to take advantage of this service yourself then feel free to contact me.