One thing we’ve heard from our UBCevents users consistently is the hassle of working with those humongous URLs to event pages on our website. They’re too long for those of you sending e-mail newsletters, and certainly too huge for services like Twitter. While we do already have some integration with tools like Twitter, we are looking into improving the situation to make it easier for you to share your event information quickly and effectively.
That said, we know UBCevents is not the only one on campus running into this problem. We are currently thinking of building a URL shortening service (you may have used one like TinyURL, Bit.ly or ow.ly). URL shorteners are extremely simple tools. They take a really long Internet address, and they give you a really short one. They are perfect for a number of situations, like directing people to webpages from:
- an outdoor sign
- a Twitter status update (with 140 characters)
- a plain text e-mail newsletter
While we could build something that would meet our needs we also know it’d be that much more awesome and successful to if everyone here at UBC were able to use a URL shortener to share things from UBC with others on campus and beyond. Whether you are a student, member of staff, a club or campus initiative, faculty or the community here at UBC, we want to ask you:
Please leave a comment with what kind of service would help you out the most in your day-to-day work, and we’ll keep it in mind while we’re thinking about building a shortener!