Where we started & where it’s taken us

idek.net was started to meet a marketing need for social media. What grew from that has been life altering, and that’s not hyperbole. idek has started conversations that have changed the path of my life.

But while it has had a large impact, it hasn’t kept up with the field. It has remained a hobby. As marketers you need more, and the social channel deserves more.

More tools. More actionable information. More respect as a marketing channel.

However, I haven’t been able to devote the time to idek that it would need to really meet that need. That’s why earlier this year myself and partner started a new venture. Our goal was to start from scratch and build a marketing platform from the ground up.

A tool that would allow marketers not only to shorten links and track clicks, but something that would empower marketers to measure their social media impact. For those who aren’t aware, myself and Eric Boggs have spent the last 6 months working night and day on this. It’s not only our job, it’s our passion.

The next step

As a result of that work, we recently launched Argyle Social. For those of you who love using idek, I suggest you try it out. We’ve poured ourselves into this product and it shows. It’s not a url tracker, it’s a social media analytics platform.

Argyle is where our efforts are, it’s not just a product, but a platform backed by a company. So where does that leave idek.net? Well it seems that it’s time that we start winding it down.

I don’t want to keep the site up if it isn’t receiving adequate attention and growth. It’s not fair to you, the user. It will remain available to those of you who have user accounts for the next three months. As of October 1st we will no longer be creating new urls.

We won’t leave you hanging

Your idek links will continue to redirect indefinitely, we understand how important that is. We are also open to conversations about other needs you may have. Remember, we’re not closing the idek door to get out of this field. We’re just stepping up into a better place. And we’d love it if you came along with us!

It’s been a little while since we’ve posted an update to the blog, so excuse us while we shake out the dust.

We’re happy to announce that we have recently released a few updates to idek.net over the past few days.

• Tweeting Within Idek
  If you are logged into idek then you can tweet right from the url dashboard. This allows you to get your links out there quickly, especially if you usually leave idek open.
  
• More Access To URL shortening
  Something that also helps those who often keep idek open, you can now shorten a url from where ever you are within idek. Just look for the box at the top of every page, you can see part of it in the screenshot above. We will be tying this in more closely with tweeting in the near future too!
• Twitter Authentication
  No one likes to give their twitter password out; we’ve integrated directly with twitter so you don’t have to with idek.
• Tweet It Bookmarklet Improved
  If you aren’t aware, there are a few bookmarks that make using idek even easier. One of them, the Tweet It! bookmarklet, allows you to shorten a url and send a tweet directly from any webpage. This bookmarklet now uses Twitter authentication and we have fixed a problem that was preventing it from loading in safari.
• Manually Add Urls To Your Tracked Urls
  Have you ever created a url on another computer when not logged in? Well, now you can easily add that to your list of tracked urls by visiting the metrics page and clicking the star icon at the top right, it will automatically show up with the rest of your urls.
  
• /s or + For Metrics
  Speaking of the metrics page, you can now view it for any url by adding /s or + to the end of the url. This just makes it a bit easier for those of you who are used to bit.ly’s way of getting at metrics. (e.g. To get metrics for idek.net/6, you can go to http://idek.net/6/s or http://idek.net/6+)
• Much More
  There are a number of bug fixes as well, which is something we always try to slip in. Including fast loading of the individual metrics page for your idek links.

So check out the updates and let us know what you think. Thanks for using idek!

@covati

The new idek is live

That’s right, last night idek got a much needed update. At 12:40AM I moved it over to the latest software. Part of this upgrade also involved switching over to a new machine hosted at slicehost. The software upgrade and server swap occurred without any idek downtime. All links were created and url forwarded without a hitch. Woohoo.

We got your user accounts right here

One thing that a lot of people of have been waiting for is user accounts. Well, we finally have them at idek. That’s right, you can create a user account in a couple of seconds and idek will automatically pull in all the urls that it was tracking for you previously. It will also go out and pull in any idek urls from your tweets.

Did you create some urls with beak or in another browser while you weren’t logged in? No worries, idek will pull in any idek urls that were sent out via tweets - it checks all user accounts nightly.

So what else?

There were a number of small bugs and annoyances fixed as well as some general cleanup and spiffying up of the metrics page.

A lot of time was spent converting idek over to a new platform and new database. Together this gives us acccess to a much richer set of data and much more solid and extensible backend. This means that you’ll be seeing a lot of new features coming out over the next few days, weeks, and months.

Thanks for using idek, the exciting times (and features) are still ahead!

Are you a twitterfeed user? If so, then rejoice! You can now use idek as your url shortener of choice. I’d like to thank @Mario for taking the time to add it into his amazing little app.

Don’t know what twitterfeed is? Let me inform you: if you have a blog, you can have your posts automatically posted to twitter. Pretty simple right? Yea, pretty great too. Really twitterfeed will consume any RSS feed, so the possibilities go beyond blogging.

I expect all you loyal idekers out there to switch your twitterfeeds over now!

Thanks again to Mario! I greatly appreciate him adding idek in there.

Stemming from the interview on 30threads, idek was featured on the news a few nights ago. Forgive the somewhat poor quality; I had to capture this with my flip camera. It’s definitely gratifying to see idek getting actual press, which is something I never expected.

Thanks to all who congratulated me and idek. I have to agree with @LorenMcDonald, who said: “Congrats Adam - I guess social has arrived if they are doing TV segments on URL shorteners :-)”

Thanks again to @GinnySkal who had everything to do with this happening, and with cluing me in that it was going to be on.

@GinnySkal from @30threads was kind enough to interview me about idek a few days ago. 30Threads is a great blog here in the Raliegh area that covers the local news and tech/blogging scene. Check out the interview below.

Thanks for all your support, keep on ideking.

The idek.net website got a bit of a facelift yesterday evening before the triangle tweetup. It’s just the front page, but the rest is coming soon.

This is a huge step forward for idek, like moving out of the attic apartment at your parents’ place into a plush new condo.

I like idek’s new condo.

You might notice that things have moved around a bit, but it’s still the same old idek. In case you are wondering, these wonderful designs (and the html & CSS) were provided by @mike9r. Thanks Mike, you rule.

We hope you like it, let us know if you have problems with it - or let us know how much you love it!

Keep on ideking.

If you are in the RDU area and interested in learning about idek then you are luck. I’ll be doing a quick presentation on idek on Thursday Jan, 29th at @edgeoffice in Raleigh.

This is part of @triangletweetup, which is a very fun and informative experience. To learn more about what’s going down that night check out TriangleTweetup.org

I hope to see you there!

Url shorteners have been around for some time. The basic idea is that many urls have gotten too long. With all the parameters and information that is needed to provide you with the exact page you need links become quite combersome.

Url shorteners are just a shortcut to the longer link.

For most of the internet this isn’t a big deal; most links are hidden in webpages behind the link caption (e.g. click here). However, a number of tools that people use every day don’t hide these ugly links. These include emails, instant messenger, SMS Messages (a.k.a. Text Messages) and (more and more recently) social networking sites.

Most of these tools allow you to post links, but they don’t allow the html codes that are need to hide the actual link. Making matters worse is the fact that some social sites, such as Twitter limit the amount of space you have to send your message.

This is why there has been such a steep rise in the number of url shorteners available on the web today.

So the next time you need to send an email and are worrying about the link being ‘broken’ by email, pasting a link into facebook, sending a tweet, or even emailing someone who might view the email on mobile phone, consider using a url shortener, such as idek.net, to make things just a little easier.

8 characters and you have tweeting from wordpress. idek-rss, that’s it.

Ok, I know idek isn’t the first, but this is all part of making sure that you can get all your tweeting under one roof. Keeping with idek’s standards, this is a relatively straightforward plugin. Just in case you need help:

1. Drop it into your plugins folder
2. Click the Activate link
3. Go to the Manage tab, there will be an idek-rss sub-tab, click it
4. Enter your default pre-title blurb
5. Enter your twitter username and password
6. Hit save

That being said, I prefer to have custom text with every tweet. I hope to employ custom fields at some point in the near future to prevent cookie cutter tweets from being the norm. In the mean time. Enjoy.

A zip idek_rss can be found here: idek_rss , this contains a directory which should be placed within your plugins directory (wp-content/plugins).

As always hit me up (@covati) with any Qs, actually check out uservoice and do it there…