How to Simplify Your Life with Custom URLs

We’re living in the future! And here in the future, we sign up for online services and social media sites. Those services give us convenient, easy-to-use links for us to get back to them.

For instance, you might sign up as a bookstore affiliate. When your friend wants you to send them a link to that great book you’re reading (“Hairy Potter and the Kiln of Doom”), you want to grab an affiliate link and send it over in a text message. You visit the Amazing Online Bookstore and it gives you a special affiliate link to send your friend. Something simple, and easy to remember and type: http://ift.tt/2eGdfDd . Just type that right into a text message and you’re good to go!

Grandma Cuddles is in a tizzy. Intern MG has been working for her a couple days a week and has been doing a bang-up job. He’s automated the business beyond what anyone thought possible. Now Grandma Cuddles Day Care uses web-based systems for pretty much everything. There’s just one tiny problem … Cuddles has to access her sites from a dozen different devices throughout the Center. Not everything is bookmarked everywhere, and she doesn’t know the web addresses by heart.

It's trivial to change web providers; keep the same shortcut and just change where it goes!

And when talking on the phone to parents who are eager to rid themselves of their crying, screeching offspring, she needs to be able to give the parents directions to the online services MG set up that handle scheduling, payment, inventory, life insurance policies, and so on. All those links are impossible to remember, and equally impossible to read over the phone.

While he was here, he knew all the links by heart (of course, he has a perfect photographic memory), and would talk customers through connecting to the right page. Sadly, MG isn’t around to take the calls this semester. He’s taking a foreign semester abroad. He’s living in a castle in the Netherlands. Yes, a castle. (I never got to live in a castle when I was a student. But I guess MG is just special. I had to walk uphill to school both ways. Builds character. Too bad MG won’t get to build character. Ha ha joking. not really) Without him around, Grandma Cuddles is at her wit’s end.

Fortunately, the answer to her problems is just a few keystrokes away.

Create Shortcuts for Long URLs

When you have complicated URLs, you need to remember: use a URL shortener. A URL shortener lets you enter a long, complicated URL and it gives you back a short, simple one that you can type into a browser and it will redirect you to the same place as the original link. 

You can take your Amazing Bookstore Affiliate link, run it through a shortener, and get a really tiny URL that you can give to a friend, something like http://ift.tt/2f2Qe0V, a tiny link that will redirect you to the Amazon page for my book. Only the TinyUrl is easier to remember.

There are a lot of link shorteners, but I believe that TinyUrl.com was the very first. And it’s free. And it doesn’t require an account. And it doesn’t have a monthly service charge. 

Grandma Cuddles can simply create a TinyUrl http://ift.tt/2eGcUk3, which magically redirects to the magical link that her third-party scheduling platform gave her for scheduling the daycare’s medical intake appointments. 

She starts all her short URLs start with the word “cuddles” to distinguish them from abbreviations someone else may have created containing the word “calendar.”

Create Shortcuts on Your Site

Of course, rather than relying on a 3rd party service, if you have your own web site you can have your web site do the redirects. Grandma Cuddles has her own web site, she can simply have http://ift.tt/2f2MMn6 redirect straight to her calendar program. 

Now she can just tell people over the phone, “To schedule a full examination of your adorable little tot to assess whether they have what it takes to survive and thrive in the Grandma Cuddles happy fun play rooms, just go to http://ift.tt/2f2MMn6 and book yourself an appointment. Easy for Grandma to remember, easy to say by phone, and easy for desperate parents to type into a web browser.

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Use Your Shortcuts for All Kinds of Services

Shortcuts come in handy everywhere you use a third-party system. The Day Care center uses an online inventory system to keep track of craft materials like ropes, facilities supplies like zip ties and clamps, and of course, storage containers like handy dandy 55-gallon drums. Grandma Cuddles swears by them. She says you can never have too many 55-gallon drums.

By creating the handy-dandy shortcut http://ift.tt/2eGeNx8, she can get to her inventory supplies any time she needs them.

You can also use shortcuts for any online service that gives you a custom URL:

• Any online payment page for people to send you money. http://ift.tt/2f2PRmX takes you right to Grandma’s send-me-money page.
• Video conferencing services. At least once a month, Grandma holds her famous “Don’t Spare the Rod” parenting webinar. She never remembers the long, complicated webinar URL. She shortened it to http://ift.tt/2eGgrz5. Now she can always go straight there. Effortlessly!
• Secure messages. Grandma likes parents to be able to send her confidential messages, because even the walls have ears. She has an upload page at Hushmail.com where parents can communicate without fear prying eyes. http://ift.tt/2f2KQL8 takes her—and everyone else—right to her upload form.
• Shared folders and files. Sharing services like DropBox and Google Drive let you share files and folders, but have absurdly long, impossible-to-remember URLs. If you use the same shared file for your weekly team agenda minutes, just create a redirect.
• Control panels. Any time a service gives you a website control panel, use a redirect to make it quick to find. Even though it’s possible to navigate to her ISP’s domain name control panel through the interface, Grandma Cuddles has a shortcut: http://ift.tt/2eGgsD9 takes her right to her control panel, easy-peasy.

Redirect Shortcuts When Your Services Change

The other advantage of using shortcuts that you host on your own site is that you can keep the same shortcut and change where it goes. If today, Grandma uses Giggles Calender, then http://ift.tt/2f2MMn6 can go to her Giggles Calendar page. But if later she decides to use a grownup calendar, like Lookout Calendar, she can change http://ift.tt/2f2MMn6 to go to Lookout Calendar, and voila, she’s charged services and everyone’s bookmarks and memory still works. No need for anyone to need the Lookout Calendar URL.

Learn How to Set Up Your Own Redirects

It’s too complicated to explain in a podcast, but if you have your own web site, I’ve published instructions for several different ways you can create your own redirect pages. Just visit http://ift.tt/2eGjeYM for details. And yes, that, itself, is a redirect page!

This is Stever Robbins. Follow GetItDoneGuy on Twitter and Facebook. I run programs to help people have Extraordinary Lives and extraordinary careers. If you want to know more, visit http://ift.tt/1l2uWN6. 

Work Less, Do More, and Have a Great Life!