Wednesday, August 2, 2017

Shout Key for shortened URLs on the fly






Need a temporary shortened URL on the fly that is easy?

You are at a workshop and forgot to link to a resource.  You don't want to have to send an email.  Sometimes, setting up a bit.ly can be a pain with lots of long letters.  Goo.gl uses combinations of letters, caps and numbers.  Then you need someplace to display the link or zoom in on it.  You also do not care about tracking clicks or reusing the link.

   So what do you do?

   Well, I found another solution to the dilemma.  Today, thanks to some browsing
   on 
social media, I discovered a new to me URL shortener called Shout Key.  





The concept is quite simple.  Go to http://www.shoutkey.com.  Paste the URL you want to get a shortened link for.  Another feature, is that the link expires.  You can set it from a little as 5 minutes to 24 hours.  

The link that is created is a simple word instead of random combinations of letters, numbers and symbols.  

For example, your link would be: 

 http://www.shoutkey.com/piece.  

Your participants can type shoutkey.com/piece without having to type the http://www. portion of the URL.  

Now that is pretty handy in my opinion.  

I wouldn't use this for everything since I occasionally like to track clicks to see if our staff looks at a resource we send out or to see how many participants from a workshop went to your links.  But, on the fly, this is great.  What a simple solution.

I hope you find this helpful. 

Jen