YOURLS is a URL shortening service you can run on your own server, and it comes with a Wordpress plugin called YOURLS Wordpress to Twitter. In the past I’ve used WP to Twitter, but since it doesn’t support YOURLS I’ve had to switch.

I’ve asked the author of YOURLS Wordpress to Twitter to add Google Analytics Campaign Tracking Code with a custom field for authors to add their own identifier, but he has been too busy updating the YOURLS scripts, so I’ve hacked the plugin code to allow us to use Campaign Tracking now.

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Today YOURLS 1.4 was released, but the database upgrade script created some errors for some people, dead links, and the stats are not working. We can fix all that. Be sure to logout of the old version you will be upgrading from before starting the upgrade, or you might see the Install YOURLS page and link, rather than the Upgrade YOURLS page and link. First lets go over the changes in the config.php file.

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Most people use URL shortening services like Bit.ly, TinyURL, Awe.sm, Su.pr, and the list goes on. There has been a lot of concern over the long term stability of these services, since they aren’t profitable business models, so they can’t be relied on over the long haul. One popular service, Cli.gs announced it will shutdown on October 25. Tr.im sudently shutdown, and then reopened just as suddenly, so it’s hard to trust short URL services. One effort will be to provide an independent directory service for URL mappings through 301works.org, but that isn’t going to solve the problem of reliability.

Sometimes the only way to solve a problem is to do it yourself. I’m talking about setting up your own URL shortening service using YOURLS: Your Own URL Shortener, which is a set of PHP scripts written by Lester Chan and Ozh Richard. Let’s go through what YOURLS offers and how to set it up.

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Starbucks is a necessity for a lot of people, but it’s also quite expensive, and very fattening. A grande sized latte runs $4.12, and at two lattes per day that comes out to $41.20 for a 5 day work week, $164.80 per month, and $1,977.60 per year. I’m going to show you how to make the same latte for about $0.10 to $0.20 per grande sized cup at home, or in your office in about 5 minutes or less. At 2 lattes per day it would cost $96 per year, so you could save 1,881.60 per year by making your own lattes. Here’s how.

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A robots.txt file is the gatekeeper for your web site or blog that either allows or disallows search engine spiders from indexing your web site. If you don’t have a robots.txt file the spiders and bots make an assumption about how they should access your web site. We want to send clear instructions as to what we want spiders and bots to do.

Assuming you want maximum traffic to your web site you’ll want to allow all spiders and bots access to crawl and index everything on your web site. Sometimes the names of spiders and bots change, so it’s a good idea to allow them all. Some instructions will have a bunch of lines for a robots.txt file listing all the spiders and bots they know of, but again we just want to cover all of them without having to keep modifying the robots.txt file in the future.

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