Friendly greetings! It’s Torley here with an awesome video tutorial tour of tr.im my favorite URL shortener. I make video tutorials of stuff that I like and I’m passionate about and after all I don’t give a damn why bother.
Anyway tr.im, it’s a very a short URL, just four characters in a dot, well okay five. There’s a lot of URL shorteners out there, you may have seen on this life hacker while you searched for URL shortener. They’ve done a lot of articles and oh my gosh, a lot of choices I’ve tried like a dozen of them. There are a number of reasons why I like tr.im the most right now because so many of these URL shorteners they have specific features, they’re good specializing their novelties but tr.im encapsulates many of those into one tool so you don’t have to bother, you’re like, “Why the heck it creates too much cognitive overhead to have a lot of those choices?” You also notice that tr.im, we also have custom bookmark, let’s say you can drag in there or you can go ahead and install a dashboard which is nice for you Mac fans like myself but on Firefox nice browser I use it, I could very well have that too.
Let’s start with the basic so it’s easy. You’ve probably even used tiny or another one before. You just take an URL like this and select it and Ctrl C to copy and then Ctrl V to paste. In a custom role here, now you can do without that but it makes into a bunch of real little characters for at this point. I think they’re escalating upwards but a Custom URL could be like short and then you click tr.im. And by the way those who has twitter integration, if you care about that I do. All these tools linked together, it’s great for Twitter because as you know twitter character is 140 characters long and you want to be short so let’s be — here and let’s click this so we can tr.im and here it is.
So from here about, if you have your twitter log in and password, they assure us that they keep it safe and just copy that and you can try like I go to File Menu, New Tab. Ctrl V to paste that, copy paste that and enter key and it expands it automatically just like so. Now, the extra benefits come after you log in because you can get stats and that’s pretty compelling. So then, what’s up next? Well, of course you want to click log in. I’ve already repopulated this but you just type in its standard username and password after you’ve created your account, really simple process here, it’s one of the shortest darn sign up forms I’ve seen.
So, when you’re done with that, let me go back. You can click a log in, nice how it goes blue to orange. Hey, that’s like a life website contrast too. Okay anyway, log in and it brings us now to a—and some of this are the prettiest status seen on the net. Now, they are boggy in some browsers, it has some problems but they’ve been revising it. So, you can see a history. As you see these are all my past tr.im URLs that I’ve shortened and some are quite popular compared to others like this TT Xstreet. This is promoting xstreetsl.com. E-commerce for virtual world number one and just click that and you can see stats and this is my personal account. This is what you’re really looking at. I’ve been using it for weeks now you can see. I could promote this one more but—this is relatively new I think and a fancy pie chart and it tells you, it doesn’t give you personally identifying info so if you’re concerned about privacy, don’t worry about clicking one of this. It just gives you basic idea in a country, you know, who’s going to come to talk you. Nobody that’s you, that’s just freaking ridiculous most of the time. Have reasonable expectations. You could see timeline of everyday how many people clicked on it during a day. This is great if you’re running a promo campaign and you’re like I want to see—I'm going to post this for a week and then hold off and change it to another tr.im URL or something like that. And then post the week after that so you can see it correlates with time access that way, it’s a nice chart better than what excel can make, gosh turn it. And you can see, yeah I have a few referrals from here, that’s what I do on my creative thunder blogging. Click anyone of them of course and you see okay this is where it came from, pretty neat, all connections are on the web.
I amplify you’re awesome and I love tangents to get back on track and show you this information. Agents of course, now there are some bit of audit I've noticed sometimes Mac OS X accounts are higher or X accounts are higher than I would expect them to be. I got to look closer into that to see what is actually being counted but it gives you breakdown so yeah a lot of people in Firefox says quite jolly, take that IE, a location center course just general countries like I said you know it’s just an overview, it doesn’t track you down to your neighborhood or a Google maps car for that matter.
So, your account, you can just go back at anytime. You can collapse and expand your URLs. If you click here like I have, you can see all URLs and by the way this is really heady next to one of them. What I hope in the future is they have—oh you can actually search it hey, I don’t remember seeing that before, that’s cool, but otherwise if you have an URL, you want to click like a stat, like keep track of your stats on then you can just go ahead and click that and you know it’s always statistics/loginscreen. So, you just save that. You’re going to check it over a week, over a month if you’re running a campaign, that’s all really handy. I’m going to go ahead and add it various things.
One thing you can't do yet, this just make some more descriptive. I haven’t really use this a lot. I would like to be able to change the short URL. This is an auto-generated one but for customs ones I would love to change it after doing it because I know other URL shortening services can do this so I’m hoping. And by the way feedback, click here and look what are they using? User voice for their future suggestion so I voted, I did vote for that. Let me get off the beat and track again and let’s see, I think it was number six here. Why do I have 10 votes still left? I thought I voted for this but it was here somewhere that sounds nice option to change an URL that was it. And I better have a comment there too, but I didn’t and something is missing. So, let me vote for that so come on now, it’s like dig, you just vote it. Yeah, let me give three votes to allocate that. That sounds great, live.
Okay, so anyway back to the main, the beast of things—of things so that’s make any sense. You can set all this different options. I like viewing a lot of stuff just really self explanatory. It gives you a great bounce between “Hey, this gives you enough choices to be a power user yet not so many that it overwhelms you with paralysis of choice which is nice. I should change my time zone because I’m really in a pacific time and my email account profile and pretty much yeah, I like to say yap—so okidoki, let me show you how this custom bookmark works. This is really important and it works a basically the same way as Firefox extension and so this is a little better integrated or more than little.
Anyway though, it’s really, really simple to tr.im URLs with this so you don’t have to keep coming back to this website. Got your options here in a bookmarklet so okay got a different option, a basic one though will be this so I can just click and drag this and like it says it’s a bookmarklet. Now, when I’m on any page let’s go back to my thumb blog and let’s go to a—let me actually click on the Home and let’s find something cool here “Oh, that’s nice” I click there and you see that’s pretty longer. Now, I can just click tr.im here to use the bookmarklet and shorten it and there it is, shorten just like that.
Long story short, that’s tr.im. Go ahead give it a whirl. I’m just going to log out now. It’s really, really simple to use. Really enjoyable and the benefits are not just making the URL shorter of course, its enjoyability of having the stats that you can track in compatibility with other services to help with your online connected life. Gosh, I remember when I was in—do you remember that? Well, log on those days and check it out—
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services