prosthetic knowledge

As Bit.ly have made their Pro service free, if you choose to, you can set up your own custom short-URL address. Sure, its vain like a personal number plate, but I though, why not.

Example: http://prsk.nl/lLq19O

Kevin Jagger (aka @KevinJagger) has posted intstructions on how to do this yourself:

For those interested, here are the step-by-step instructions on how to do it. 

1. Go to Bit.ly Pro and apply for a Pro Account. It is free but takes a couple of days for them to approve your account. Best to get that process started right away.
2. Go to GoDaddy.com (full disclosure, this link goes to my affiliate page) and select a solid short URL (.ca and .me’s are good as they save an extra character from a .com - also available 3 to 4 letter .com’s are extremely rare).
3. Once you have bought your new custom URL you need to direct it to Bit.ly. You do this by changing the “A Record” of the domain to redirect to Bit.ly. To do this…
4. Log into your GoDaddy account.
5. Under “Products” tab, select “Domains”, then “Domain Management”.
6. Select the domain name that you want to use as your custom URL shortener
7. Click “Manage Domain”
8. Under “DNS Manager” click “Launch”
9. Change the “A (Host)” to the following IP address: 168.143.174.97 (that will redirect to Bit.ly)

Give it a couple hours and you should be good to go. When you go to Bit.ly and have a URL shortened it will use your new custom URL instead of Bit.ly

There isn’t a convenient automatic way to use this custom URL in Tumblr’s automatic twitter posting. Either you shorten them manually, or use Twitterfeed, which can take your Tumblr RSS feed and can call your Bit.ly account with an API key. It is semi-automatic - it needs to call up the feed (which it does every hour unless you manually do so from the site), but adds terms to the URL address which isn’t neat or possibly representative of the content you are trying to share.

Well, this was my experiment for today - should you be interested in doing the same, I hope this is helpful.