Announcing Ph.ly: Philadelphia’s URL shortener and a weekly email showcasing Philly’s best journalism

Technically Philly parent company Technically Media is excited to announce Ph.ly, a new URL shortener dedicated specifically to Philadelphia links and stories.

In one month of existence in soft launch mode, more than 250 links have been shared and clicked 20,000 times.

Alongside the URL Shortener, we’ve also announced the Ph.ly News Weekly, a weekly newsletter of Philly’s most important journalism. By signing up using the form at Ph.ly, you’ll receive a weekly email highlighting the three best stories in Philadelphia journalism from every source, curated by the team at Technically Media. It will always remain a free service.

In soft launch, more than 100 locals have already signed up. We’re hoping to grow the list to a few thousand users by April 30 before we start sending out the weekly email. Call it an email Kickstarter campaign.

The Ph.ly service features all the bells and whistles you’ll find with other URL shorteners: you can create custom vanity URLS (like ph.ly/keypulp) and you can check click statistics (like http://ph.ly/st9lp+). You can even add a custom this bookmarklet to your browser toolbar to instantly shorten URLs using the service, seen in the sidebar above.

Read more

It took New York to create a Philly URL shortener

Let’s give credit where credit’s due.

While they’ve been blowing out coverage of local real estate issues, the Philly edition of Brownstoner brought something else to the table. They’ve introduced a Philly-specific URL shortener, ph.ly.

We’re a little shell-shocked that the 67th ward beat us to it, but it’s certainly a novel idea.

Like traditional URL shortners, ph.ly lets users enter a URL to be shortened to the four-character domain for short messaging services like Twitter. Users can track total clicks, or stats over the last month or week. More features are expected, like compatibility with Twitter. Only thing that’s missing—but available in services like tinyurl—is the ability to provide your own link name instead of random character generation.

Read more