There are many good URL shortening services around, like bit.ly, twu.rl and the WP-centric wp.me, and I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with those. However, if like me, you happen to have a nice short domain lying around that you’d like to use, why not make your own?

Install WordTwit

WordTwit is a plugin for WordPress by BraveNewCode for integrating your WordPress website with your Twitter account. I owe big thanks to Mikko Saari for telling me about it. The reason why I liked this specific plugin is it’s feature for creating short URLs using your own domain.

You can install WordTwit either directly from your WordPress admin (under Plugins > Add new) or by downloading the zip and uploading it to your server under wp-content/plugins/.

Redirect short domain to longer domain

There are different ways to do this. Because I’m running this site on a dedicated server, I created a new VHOST entry for the second domain (dani.fi) and inserted the following:

<VirtualHost *>
   ServerName dani.fi
   Redirect 301 / http://danielkoskinen.com/
</VirtualHost>

Replace dani.fi with your own short domain name and danielkoskinen.com with the main domain for your site. If you’re running on a shared web host, you can probably just create a redirect in CPanel or equivalent.

Configure WordTwit settings

Enable WordTwit, find it’s settings page and the section marked URL Shortening. Choose “Local” from the menu and save your settings. This will reload the page and reveal more options. You can now enter your short domain in the field marked “Use Alternate Domain”.

Save your settings, and you’re done!

Try it out

Go to edit any post, and you’ll find the short URL for the current post in the right sidebar, using your new nice-and-short domain name! There’s also a button to post a message to Twitter (which can be set up automatically for new posts with WordTwit).

The post Make your own short URLs with WordPress appeared first on Daniel Koskinen.

The iStat App from Bjango is one of the many cool reasons for having an iPhone. In addition to giving system stats of the device itself (not so interesting) it enables easy monitoring of remote servers. There’s a free server app for those with a Mac server they want to monitor, but most interestingly they have a command-line app for Linux and Solaris.

Setting it up requires some command-line tinkering, but to anyone familiar with configuring and compiling with configure and make this should be a breeze.

Once the server daemon is running, using iStat on the iPhone is really simple and easy. You set up a profile for each server and can access real-time data on uptime, load averages, cpu, pageins, pageouts, network & memory usage.

I’ve had two remote servers running iStat Server for a couple of weeks, and can only say it works like a charm! All I wish for is a similar Mac desktop app for remote servers – the iStat Pro Dashboard widget only shows info of the system it’s running on. Know of any?

The post Using iStat to monitor remote servers appeared first on Daniel Koskinen.