Six URL Shorteners to Make Your Life Easier, Plus a Bonus to Make You Feel Secure!

Because of horrible, malicious virus writers who spend their days trying to figure out clever ways to take over our computers, our bank accounts and the universe, we are warned again and again to never click on anything that we don’t recognize. I used to tell students in my computer courses, “Even if your grandmother sends you a link, be suspicious. Make sure you know where you’re going before you click.”

This is great advice, or it was until a couple of years ago, when Twitter’s 140-character limits meant that we would be 11 characters over just by pasting a link such as http://www.cheapskatefreelancer.com/2010/03/pdfescape-the-pdf-editor-ive-been-dreaming-ofe-online-pdf-reader-editor-form-filler-form-designer-solution/.

With Twitter and other services, brevity was imperative. So they started creating URL shortening services that let you convert a long URL into a teeny, tiny one.

Now back to the security issue. If your grandmother sends you a long link like the one above, you’d probably trust it. But what if the link she sends is http://z.pe/56lG? You may think your grandmother has become a hacker and try to block her.

Some people have an inherent (and justified) fear of shortened URLs since you can’t see what you’re clicking on. But I have good news. A 2010 study by Zscaler Inc., a company that sells security services, looked for malicious content in 1.3 million shortened links taken from Twitter over two weeks. Just 773 of those links – 0.06 percent – were malicious. The rest were just grandmothers and regular users like you and me sharing information and resources with others.

Here are just a few URL shorteners that I use:

• A.gd (http://a.gd): Cool options like password protection, link tagging and expiration dates, plus traffic tracking.
• Bit.ly (http://bit.ly): Twitter’s built-in shortener.
• BudURL (http://budurl.com): It’s a long link, but BudURL offers all kinds of tracking information to help with your marketing.
• Is.gd (http://is.gd): I love this little guy. It has no bells or whistles, but it stands for “is good.” That makes me happy.
• Threely (http://3.ly): Lets your viewers preview the link before they click (so you can verify your grandmother is still a good person), and allows custom URLs, such as http://3.ly/Cheapskate (goes to www.cheapskatefreelancer.com, of course).
• TinyURL (http://tinyurl.com): The first service I discovered that would shrink a long link into a short one. They’re still around, but now the URL seems impossibly long.
• Unhid (www.unhid.co.cc/): This site will convert a shortened URL to its actual link so you can take a peek before clicking.

(PS — this post is a preview excerpt from the Cheapskate Freelancer book, available in October!)

Contact Me — No, really this time

Dear Cheapskate Freelancer readers,

My email system had a hitch in its git-a-long for the last couple of days, and the Contact Us form was shooting your valuable comments into cyberspace. It’s working now, so please feel free to contact me here or send me an email through scr.im (another cool free tool!): http://scr.im/bethz.

Sorry for the inconvenience!

Dropbox: Store, Share and Sync Your Files

It’s about time I profile Dropbox, a great little tool my readers have mentioned several times, and it came up again when I was presenting  “Free and Low-Cost Tech Tools Your Organization Can’t Live Without” at the Fancy Food Show this week.

Dropbox allows you to synchronize your files among your computers and also stores them online for access anywhere. This is a fantastic application for those of us who travel and don’t want to deal with throwing files on thumb drives. Its storage capacity matches Mozy.com for backups and its feature set is on par with Live Mesh.

You receive two gigs of storage with the free version, and 50 is only $9.99 a month.

Dropbox – Home – Secure backup, sync and sharing made easy.

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