Oliver Gassner: Digitale Tage

Well, believe me, the question that one person who googled and landed in this blog also irritates me, but as you are here you might be have the above question.

So.

There are two places in Twitter where you can place links
a) In your profile
b) In your 'Tweets', those are the 140 character messages that you send out.

a) in your Profile

The Link in your profile is set on the page http://twitter.com/account/settings
Do not forget to start your link with http:// and maybe test it once it shows up on your profile page. (You'll reach that by clicking on the Profile link on any Twitter page.
Others will see that link if they are on the page http://twitter.com/ YOURTWITTERNAME
Exper hint: Linkbuilders might want to note that this ink is attributed 'nofollow' and does niot add to your Google Ranking.

b) In your tweets.

Just mention the link in your Twittermessage that you type into the box "What are you doing?"
If you should be irritated by the fact that you are not 'doing' the link;: Well, I can't help you there ;)
Make sure to type the link completely including the http://. I use the Copy/Paste function of windows or Apple to do this. If you do not know how to do this I suggest a computer course. ;)

Now you might say: But the Link is soooo long, I cannot fit it in 140 characters.

Well, that happens.

This is what URL-Shorteners are for. They make a LOOOONG URL into a tiny short one, so that it fits into the Twitter box.
Neat, right?

Now there is a simple and clumsy way to do this or a neat and complicated way

I) simple and clumsy

- Open a new window
- call the page of a URL-shortener like http://tynyurl.com oder http://bit.ly
- Copy and paste the URL you want to shorten into the appropriate 'slot' on that page
- copy and paste the resulting short URL into the Twitter box

II) neat and complicated

The neat way is only complicated the first time

Preparation (complicated)
- Make sure your browser hat it's bookmark-bar visible (at the very top of the browser, check your browsers manual / help function for this)
- Go to one of the URL shortenetres mentioned above and check for the 'Bookmarklet' they offer
- This usually involves
-- identifying the bookmarklet
-- clicking it with the left mousebutton WITHOT letting that button go
-- dragging it to the bookmark bar
-- letting the mouse button go
-- voila, the Bookmarklet is now in your Bookmark bar

URL shortening (neat)

Now when you need to shorten a URL
- go to the page the URL of which you wanna shorten
- click your Bookmarklet
- wait a few secob´nds
. and a page with the shortened URL shows up
- copy/paste the resulting URL into the Twitter box
- that was fun, right?

As a little reward for reading up to here while not banging your herad against the wall too much, I have a secret powertipp for you. Yes, just for you alone:

There is an even simpler way. Some Services even allow the shortened URL to go RIGHT into the Twitter box. (yep, rocket science at your fingertipps)

http://bit.ly is such a service.
Check it out ;)

And a final free and extra bonus tipp: If you link to much to silly pages where you want to sell something to people, they will get angry and BLOCk you. That means you are gone from Twitter for all eternity. Prayng won't help then.
So be careful what links you send out.

And totally finally: If you use tabbed browsing (check the help of your browser) the above becomes so much simpler ;)