A new version of “Linking You” (lncn.eu), our home-grown URL shortener, has just been launched by ICT services/LNCD.
Features of the new lncn.eu include:
- Links can now only be created by University of Lincoln staff and students – you have to be signed in to create short URLs. (The links themselves remain publicly accessible.) This change has been made to prevent misuse of the service. There are plenty of public URL shorteners if you can’t sign in to use lncn.eu.
- Once you’re signed in, you can see a list of all the short URLs you’ve already created.
- If you’re using the lncn.eu API to create short URLs, or using lncn.eu in a Twitter client (e.g. Twitterfeed) you now need to use an API key to validate your requests.
- You can now easily specify a custom URL when you minify a URL (e.g. http://lncn.eu/ezproxy). Click on the “Options” button to access this feature.
- It’s still possible to minify URLs including a wildcard – this is a bit of a hidden feature, but very useful. To use this feature, replace the wildcard part of the original URL with {{x}} – for example, you could minify the long Amazon search URL:
- http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=sr_adv_b?search-alias=stripbooks&unfiltered=1&__mk_en_GB=%C5M%C5Z%D5%D1&field-keywords=&field-author=&field-title=&field-isbn={{x}}&field-publisher=&node=&field-binding_browse-bin=&field-subject=&emi=&field-dateop=&field-datemod=&field-dateyear=&sort=&Adv-Srch-Books-Submit.x=0&Adv-Srch-Books-Submit.y=0
- …it would then be possible to link to books on Amazon, by ISBN, using the URL format: http://lncn.eu/dmvx/XXXXXXXXXXXXX – where the Xs are any ISBN. Examples:
- Finally, there’s an upgraded browser bookmarklet for the service. The look and feel of lncn.eu has also been updated to the newest version of the University’s Common Web Design (CWD).
From the ‘old’ lncn.eu:
To the new:






