Finding an unused domain name is hard, finding available short domains is even harder.

Last Christmas I got myself this new domain for my URL shortener. JCOS.IO yeah!

Nice present for myself.

I just finished setting it up again because I was busy with work and with life these past few months.

There was a problem with my previous install.

A little introduction to URL shorteners. They make your links short. That is all. 😀

Why would you want to do that???

For example on twitter, the number of characters per tweet is limited to 140 characters. So if you have a really cool link you need to share to your followers and friends no matter what.

“OMGSH!!! hey check out this really cool site. the squirrel is on a jet pack with laser guns and shoots when you click!!! http://www.omglasergunspewpewpew.com/”

This won’t do because this exceeds twitter’s tweet limit. By shortening our link we can be sure that the awesomeness will be shared.

“OMGSH!!! hey check out this really cool site. the squirrel is on a jet pack with laser guns and shoots when you click!!! url.jcos.io/omgpewpew – http://www.omglasergunspewpewpew.com/”

Above example also exceeds tweet limit but you get the point.

Usually we’ll go to Bitly or TinyURL for our shortening needs but YOURLS lets us do the same on our own server. It even means Your Own URL Shortener and it’s free!

I’m not going into details about how to set it up there are many other sites which provide detailed and easy to follow instructions like the following:

url.jcos.io/2 – https://lifehacker.com/sucking-is-the-first-step-to-being-sorta-good-at-somet-1553829831

url.jcos.io/3 – https://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/build-your-own-url-shortener-with-yourls–cms-22638

url.jcos.io/4 – https://raventools.com/blog/custom-url-shortener/

url.jcos.io/5 – https://trickspanda.com/install-yourls/

Even the instructions on yourls homepage is clear enough.

url.jcos.io/url/6 – http://yourls.org/#Install

I’ve also read that getting your own domain for URL shortener is great for branding.

That’s cool if you’re into that thing. Branding, marketing and stuff.

Let me know if you’d like some help with setting up your own yourls by leaving a comment below.

I get my domains for less at Namecheap.

They have some promos that you can get for $2 and below for first year.

☝️ I receive a commission from Namecheap for purchases made through these links.

This comes with no additional cost and helps me with food Gundam money

Thank you

Or you can also reach me on twitter: url.jcos.io/twitter – https://twitter.com/sudoist or linkedin: url.jcos.io/linkedin – https://ph.linkedin.com/in/johncosio

Update:

As I’m moving to Digital Ocean and using jcos.io as primary domain, I think I won’t be needing to use a url shortener for now.

Added the original links and it really shortens stuff but I don’t even use twitter now so… Yeahhhh taking it down now.