10 Useful Resources for Lessn, The URL Shortener

Recently I’ve bought myself a short domain for use with octalforty.com. Previously I’ve been using bit.ly for all my links on Twitter and I just thought it’s about time to use a url shortener service that could represent octalforty as a brand instead.

After spending few hours researching on the options available to me, I’ve decided to go with Lessn, by the great Shaun Inman.

Since Lessn is offered as-is, without support and without warranty, it would take some effort to bend it to your needs. So here I’ve listed down few ways you could use, or extend Lessn! Let’s go!

  1. Custom Shortlinks For WordPress

    Dean Robinson wrote a nice tutorial on how to use Lessn and WordPress together. With the method, instead of having to create a shortlink for each of your post, he basically used the post ID with your short domain, to mask the original WordPress shortlink.

    Read the full tutorial, Custom Shortlinks For WordPress.

  2. WP Lessn

    WP Lessn was written by Jay Robinson, and uses Shaun Inman’s Lessn to create a short URL for each new post you publish. The Lessn’d link is attached to the post meta data. The only drawback I see here is when you have a lot of existing published posts, you’ll need to re-publish them in order to generate a short link for each post.

    Download WP Lessn from WordPress Plugin Directory.

  3. Listr for Lessn

    Listr was written by Arley McBlain to actually list down all the original URLs and their shortened link, in a page for easy reference.

    Get Listr at debutcreative.com

  4. Lessn & Tweetie 2.0 bookmarklet

    Manasto Jones came up with this nifty little bookmarklet to make it easier to shorten a URL, and get Tweetie to include the shortened link in a new status update

    Get the bookmarklet from Lessn and Tweetie by Monasto.

  5. Lessn & Tweetie 2.0 Custom URL Shortener

    Author of Lessn, Shaun Inman himself shows you how to setup Tweetie 2.0 to use your Lessn installation as a custom URL shortener.

    See how to set Tweetie 2 & Lessn up!

  6. Lessn Pepper for Mint

    Lessn Pepper tracks the most recent and most popular urls and referrers in your Lessn installation and displays them in Mint.

    Get Lessn Pepper at the pepper page.

  7. Lessn fork by Mike Tierney

    Mike Tierney created a fork of Lessn, to allow a Lessn installation to be run from the root directory, instead of having to put it inside a directory.

    Read more at the Github.

  8. Lessn OS X Service

    Steve Streza wrote a text service for Mac OS X 10.6+ which compresses URLs with Lessn or ButteredURLs.

    Get Lessn Service from the Github page.

  9. Lessn More

    Lessn More extends the original Lessn with various features like:

    • The ability to use custom short URLs (slugs).
    • Different auto-shorten modes (optional mixed case).
    • The ability to avoid lookalike characters.
    • An optional “banned word list” to prevent auto-generating offensive URLs.
    • And much more!

    Check Lessn More project page, or get it from Github.

  10. Lessn More with WordPress

    If you’re like me and decided to go with Lessn More, I’m sure you’ll be jumping around to know that Matt Wiebe wrote a WordPress plugin that integrates WordPress shortlink functionality with the Lessn More URL shortener. Sweet indeed!

    Get the plugin from Github.

Additional reading.

  1. Johnnie Munger shows how it’s possible to change Lessn’s hash pattern, to use arrays instead of the original base convertion. This allows his version of Lessn to support a much larger number of shortened links.

    Read more from his post, A Simple URL Shortener.


Comments

2 responses to “10 Useful Resources for Lessn, The URL Shortener”

  1. Amazing. I was Googling Lessn resources and see myself on the list. Thanks for the props.

    1. It was an honor sir! Thank you for sharing Listr with the rest of us 🙂