We are also living in the era of short mobile messages. We share things using short texts, utilizing mobile gadgets and quick and easy broadcasting services like Twitter and Facebook. That’s why URL shortening services are blooming like mushrooms in the rainy season; simply because modern net users think that writing long URLs takes up too much time and effort (and those links would eat up Twitter’s character limit).
But shortening URLs only solves one problem. We still have to use lots of shortened URLs to share lots of interesting web addresses. That’s why we need services that can bundles several URLs and pack them into one short URL for us to share.
Here are three alternatives of such services that you can try.
Name.ly For Your Own URLs
Before you share every interesting URL that you discover, you should start with your own links. One of the tools that fits to do the job is Name.ly.
Name.ly is a web tool that will bundle all of your personal links into one interesting package: a personalized landing page with all of your social information, and more. Sign up at name.ly and you’ll get your own mini-blog with a short name.ly address. Customize the blog by adding all of your links and then save it.
The final result might not be as beautiful as Flavors.me – another similar landing page service; but this one is quick, easy, free, and serves its purpose well.
You can use your new name.ly short address as your email signature to replace a bunch of your social networking links that you used before. Everytime somebody clicks on your email signature, he/she will be brought to your name.ly page.
Bit.ly For Other URLs
Bit.ly has been around for some time. What makes this one different from other URL shortening services is its latest ability to bundle several links into one short URL.
But to do that, you will need to sign up with the service and log in. You will get a slightly different version of a URL shortening field. Paste in several site addresses into the field divided by a space and they will automatically be shortened.
Below the field is the list of all the shortened URLs and the “Bundle” button.
After clicking the button, you will get a “summary” page of all the links that you used. You still can edit the result by changing the bundle’s name, re-arranging the order, and adding more links to it.
There’s the “Bundle stats” pane on the right where you can see quick information and statistics for your bundle, copy the short URL, plus the buttons to “Preview” and “Share“.
RSSMix For Feeds
This link bundling tool is a little bit different. Instead of combining web addresses, RSSMix will merge the content of several RSS feeds into one and create a new RSS address.
All that you have to do is put some RSS feeds into the mixing field and click the “Create” button.
You will get the new feed that you can put into your default RSS reader and/or share with your friends.
You can also modify your mix, add or remove feeds to create a new one, by clicking the “create a new mix from this mix” link.
Other than sharing the mixed feed(s) to your friends, you could also use RSSMix for your personal use to create several combinations of your favorite feeds based on the “genre”, for example: news, gadget, entertainment, sport, etc (or even combine them all into one giant collection). This will reduce your headaches in the future when you want to change your default RSS reader. Instead of copying lots of RSS feeds between clients, you’ll only need to copy one.
Hopefully the three tools above can also help you lighten the loads of dealing with links. If you have your own favorite tools to solve the problem, share them using the comments section below.
Image credit: uteart
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