Create custom shortened links

When you do a lot online there is usually a need to track which of your efforts are actually being paid attention to and which are not. One way is to track how many people are clicking on the links you post. Bit.ly is a service letting you shorten links, but did you know you can customize those links?

A Bit.ly account

The best route with this process is to create a free Bit.ly account. This will give you more options that we’ll talk about later.

The sign up steps are pretty minimum. You can put in the usual info or use Facebook or Twitter to create an account.

Once you have an account, you should see a dashboard like this.


Near the top right you will see the Puffer fish near the text box. This is where you will paste a long link to shrink it.



When you shrink a link it will look something like this.

 








See the link next to the word copy in the bottom right? This is your shortened link. If you were to copy and paste this link to anywhere, the person clicking on your link will be taken to whatever link you shrunk.

Creating a custom link

To make your own link, you can click the pencil next to the link. The box will pop up and let you type whatever you’d like in the box.

What you will want to do here is add something descriptive. If you are linking to an article you wrote about big orange spiders, you can add that as your custom link. I made a link with the end “nikoo28blog”.

Now you can easily share this link with your friends without the hassle of remembering long names... :-)

Convert file

Have you ever encountered problems like you have a pdf file but you require it as a jpeg image. The screen capture wont work because the file is large to fit in one screen.
Maybe you want to go the other way round and convert this jpeg to pdf.

What about music? You have a .wav file but want the mp3 version or the .ogg version.
What about video? You have a .flv version but want the .avi version.
Everyone has his/her own conversion needs.

Definitely one way is to have a encoding tool or a different converting tool for each type of file.

Luckily, there is a easier way... :-)

Recently I came across this excellent online tool that meets all your conversion needs.

Step 1.>
Open www.zamzar.com
The site offers a pretty simple interface in which you need to upload the file you want to convert.
Let it be any image file. Upload the file and proceed to step 2.

Step 2.>
Choose your format.

As you see, the site offers multiple options for conversions. Select your desired output and proceed.

Step 3.>
Since the site is absolutely free, they now ask you for your email address where the converted file will be sent.

Step 4.>
Click on convert and you are good to do. Depending upon the file size you will receive a download link in your inbox.
Converting was never this easy... :-)