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…

I was putting this off for a bit, mostly because I’ve been focusing solely on getting features out. However, I was struggling to get info out there about the new features. So here it is, the idek blog, found simple at b.idek.net.

I’ve already posted the help videos that I previously created. I haven’t gotten a lot of feedback on these videos yet. Is the volume to low? Do you not want to see my mug? Are they helpful? Let me know.

One quick note, as I recently tweeted, idek was just accepted as a source for Twitter. This means that if you tweet from the Tweet it! bookmark, your tweets will show up in the clients as coming from idek. Pretty cool.

If you have any questions or ideas for features, please just DM or @covati

Adam
Founder of idek.net

A recent feature that’s pretty exciting is the new Tweet it! bookmark. With this tool you can tweet directly from any webpage, capturing the url via idek and providing your own comment. You can actually highlight some text and that will be automatically included in your tweet as well. For the full skinny, check out this quick video on how to set get tweeting.

Any questions? Just DM @covati

Url Shorteners like idek.net are great for places where characters are at a premium. Whether that be a tweet or an SMS message. Some people have asked me how the url redirects work and how they affect SEO. This quick video gives a basic overview of 301 redirects which is what idek.net uses to get your from a short url to a long one.

Other Resources:

• URL redirection on Wikipedia
• An example analytics page from idek.net