The Liverpool URL Shortener

One of the things that’s risen in popularity with the rise of Twitter is the URL shortener - those services that take the long and unwieldy (if informative) web addresses and chop them down into something that still lets you include a few words of explanation as to why you’re posting links to your followers.

I’ve long been a fan of bit.ly, but at the weekend I came across one with a lovely Liverpool twist. Scou.se will let you post links prefixed with the excellent scou.se prefix.

However, one thing they don’t have is a bookmarklet to let me do one-click URL shortening. With bit.ly I have a button on my browser toolbar, and when I want to shorten a URL I just click that button. It launches a new tab which contains the shortened URL for the site I was on when I clicked the button. Then it’s simple for me to copy and paste that into Twitter to send my message.

So, a quick look at the source code for scou.se later, I present the Shorten with Scou.se bookmarklet.

On Firefox, Chrome and Safari (I don’t think it works on Internet Explorer, but I could be wrong) just drag the Shorten with Scou.se link to your toolbar. Then next time you want to shorten a URL, just click it.