Custom DIY Link Shortening for Your Social Networks

If you maintain a lot of social networks, like many artists and musicans, it’s often difficult for people to find all your different profiles without you sending them direct (and often long) links. Today i got an email from my friend deepchild, a musician and avid internet user, with a brilliant new way to simplify everything.
Check out his new email signature:

www.deepchild.com/twitter
www.deepchild.com/flickr
www.deepchild.com/youtube
www.deepchild.com/myspace
www.deepchild.com/facebook

So short, so sweet! It’s also a simple technical procedure. If your hosting provider doesn’t offer a way to do an automatic redirect, you can do it yourself by editing a text file with only one line of code. Here’s the step by step process:

1. Open a simple text editor (like TextEdit for Mac users), NOT Pages or Word.
2. Paste the following line of code into a new document:

   <?php header("Location: http://YOUR-URL.COM/"); ?>

3. Change YOUR-URL.COM to the URL of your desired location, such as your Twitter or Facebook profile.
4. Save the file as index.php.
5. Upload the file using FTP to a new directory on your website, with a name that corresponds to the location of the link.
   Example: deepchild.com/twitter/

Repeat for each network! Now you can send people a clean and simple list of links to all your networks at once. They will also be able to remember them easily for future reference.

If you’d like to hear more from deepchild, you can follow along with his adventures on tour in Europe right now at www.deepchild.com, or check out his currently featured podcast at Electronic Groove: www.electronicgroove.com/EG081Deepchild.php