A friend replied to my newsletter to say the links were not working. She was reading it on her iPhone. She tapped one, got a browser warning screen, and the page never loaded.
I have been building websites since the 1990s. I talk to clients about secure connections most weeks. And there I was, sending out links that made her phone warn her about my own email.
One letter, a lot of damage
The cause was http instead of https. That is it. One letter.
What matters is what she actually saw. Not a broken link. A full screen telling her that something here might not be safe. She did not think “Andrew has a config problem”. She thought, for a second, that my email might be dodgy.
We spend our time on the things people are supposed to notice. Type, spacing, colour, the small stuff nobody thanks you for. Then a warning screen turns up and wipes all of it in about half a second. It is not a design problem exactly, but it lands in the same place. Someone makes a fast judgement about you and moves on.
I do not know how many issues went out like that. I would rather not think about it.
What I was using and what I changed
I had been shortening links with Rebrandly. It did the job for a while and I stopped paying attention to it, which is the real mistake here.
I moved to tinycc.com instead. The thing that sold it to me was not the service itself, it was that I did not need to buy anything new. I already owned a domain sitting there doing nothing: backhouse.tips.
I could have used a subdomain on one of my existing sites. Plenty of people do. But the domain on its own is shorter, and short is the whole point of a shortened link.
The setup, if you fancy doing the same
It was not complicated.
The domain sits with 123-reg. I moved the nameservers over to Cloudflare, then pointed the A record at tinycc.com. Tinycc costs me $5 a month. That is the lot.
The links now load over https, they carry my name, and they look like something a person sent rather than something a machine generated.
Why use your own domain for this
Three reasons, and none of them are complicated.
People can see where a link is going before they tap it. A link with your name in it tells them, a random string of characters does not.
You keep the domain if you ever change service. The links you sent last year keep working, because you own the bit that matters.
And it looks like you. That should not count for much, but it does.
Go and check yours
Find the last email or post where you shortened a link. Tap it on your phone. Not your laptop, your phone, because that is where most people will read what you send.
If you get a warning, you have just found the same problem I did. It does not take long to fix, and it is the sort of thing that stays invisible until somebody tells you.
Which only happened because a friend bothered to reply. Most people would have just stopped clicking.
