Recently we put up our own URL shortening service using the domain nxr.me. This service is not designed for commercial use as such, but will be part of our own share and bookmarking services that we provide in all our online financial reports.
What is a URL shortener?
URL shortening is a technique in which the used URL may be made substantially shorter in length. A HTTP Redirect at this short URL guides visitors to the target website, with the long URL. (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL_shortening)
Why is this useful?
With microblogging plattforms like Twitter short URL services became popular, but somehow they are not as reliable and secure as they should be. So we decided to host the shortened URLs for our reports on our own. Having full control over your URLs is very important and just feels better. Besides that, having your own short URLs is pretty cool 
What it is not
Unfortunately this is not a public service. It will only be used for reports created by Nexxar. If you visit one of our customers report and share a page via Twitter, a short URL is generated automatically. Currently we are using AddThis, which will be replaced by nxr.me in future reports. We see this as an effective way to increase security as well as brand awareness as part of our long-term marketing strategy.
How did we do it?
We are using the open source system yourls (http://yourls.org/). It provides a set of functions to create your own URL shortener. With yourls as a base to start and some tweaking and tuning we had nxr.me up and running pretty fast.
Posted by Mark on October 2, 2010 at 01:47
This seems like a smart decision … inter-site links could just be processed through your url shortener.