[STEEM.LY] The Dedicated Steemit Link Shortening Service - browser extensions to follow

We are bringing you today the Steemit Link shortening service: https://steem.ly

We've worked hard to get this up and running as soon as possible and help everyone on steemit make their links shorter and more beautiful, tailored to the platform they represent.

Just as with any other link shortening service you paste your loooong link in the box, hit the SHORTEN button and then the magic happens, you get a https://steem.ly/xxXXXxx link back to use in your posts and comments.

Behind the scenes:

we've used the secured open source YOURLS (https://github.com/YOURLS/YOURLS). It's public and open for everyone to check. This means it's safe and transparent.
we are using a strong hosting company and the application is hosted in the US. CDN's are also enabled for static content throughout the world. This means it's strong and reliable.
frequent backups will ensure service continuity

So we launched steemly, what's next?

we plan to create Chrome and Firefox extensions that will automatically give you a shortened link for the page you are currently on;
we will add a dashboard with statistics on the https://steem.ly homepage to show the most visited steemlys, most recent ones etc.;
we will start allowing custom links to be created

It is in beta as we just launched it so please tell us your opinions, let us know if you see any bugs etc. so we can jump in and fix them.

We would highly appreciate your vote as it would help us bump the development further and faster on the backlog items!

@dan ( @dantheman ), @ned ( @steemit3 ) - I'm totally up for integrating this in steemit in any way you think it possible.

There might be the case that the website isn't opening for you (we surely hope it's not but anyways). It's due to the DNS propagation, it's not all over the place yet so you will need to add the below to your hosts file:
77.104.146.175 steem.ly
77.104.146.175 www.steem.ly
In max 24h this should not be an issue

Platform updates annoncements are posted below:
UPDATE #1: v0.2.0 - 7/20/2016

Thanks to everyone for checking this up and don't forget: #doyourpart in the Steemit Community!!

Comidted to value on Steemit,
Anduweb

Very cool, thank you for another awesome tool for the community!
I've got a couple of ideas:

https : https://letsencrypt.org/ is free and awesome
vanity urls : custom url selection/reservation (+market?)
stats by @ : would allow referral tracking (steem.ly/@ausbitbank)

Glad I was able to jump on this so early and got steem.ly/j

https://letsencrypt.org/ certificate has been installed and enabled and all traffic is now forced through https. Backwards compatibility measures have been enabled so all previous links should be working fine. Let me know if they don't
custom url is int he works and will be launched later today. If you want a custom one now let me know and I'll created it on the backend for you now :)

Thanks for your support and suggestions. 2 of our ideas are already implemented and we just need to implement an easier way to get access to them (custom urls and stats). SSL was indeed something we were thinking about and an open one was our thought too. Thanks again!!

Brilliant work anduweb. Thanks for being a source of value in this community, and for promoting the flagging of spam!

positive, ditto to you my man. You lead rare campaigns to curate content!

thank you. I thought bitly would make steem link look lost. having it's own steemly link will be the best! great work!!! Do post up how many people using this!!!??

A few features are in the works and yes the homepage will have some data on this as well :)
Thanks for the suggestion!

Very Nice Thanks Alot For This Tool.

My pleasure! Keep tight, other features are coming also. Check the first update: https://steem.ly/v020

YES!! YES!! MORE YES!! :D

Sweet, another nice idea! So . Many. Possibilities.

Thanks man. It helps to spread the word and make content nicer!