Friends of Propeller-

I wanted to let you know about a few additions to the Propeller web site today, designed to better serve our community. The first affects the URLs that are added to our Facebook and Twitter share feature. Up until now, we have been using the TinyURL shortening service to encode Propeller story links to better fit into the message length restrictions of Twitter. As of today, we are using our own URL shortening service, which uses the domain http://pplr.us.

The pplr.us service is different from TinyURL and other shortening services in that pplr.us links will only point to Propeller story pages (we may extend this beyond Propeller story pages in the future.) For those who have used our Facebook or Twitter share already, this change will be fairly transparent--you will notice that the links that end up in your Facebook/Twitter feed have the new pplr.us domain. Beyond that, nothing has changed with story sharing.

Additionally, thanks to a great suggestion by a relative newcomer to the Propeller community btatman22, we now have 2 separate Politics categories: Political News and Political Opinion. Since its initial launch 3+ years ago, the Propeller community has been interested in both the play-by-play and the color commentary of politics. Adding this new category will help distinguish between news reporting and opinion, and (we hope) reduce any related confusion. All existing Politics posts now appear in the Political News category, so that old links can be preserved, and the Political Opinion category is now open for business--members, please begin to use it for your opinion posts.

That's all for now--let us know how we're driving.

Live Long and Prop It!
Tom (member tdrapeau)

In its article on TinyURL, the first widely used URL shortener, Wikipedia defined the service as one "that provides short aliases for redirection of long URLs". The launch of Twitter in 2006, with its 140-character limit on posts, prompted the development of many new URL shortening services such as bit.ly and tr.im.

Some content publishers and aggregators have followed suit and integrated URL shortening into their own service to facilitate sharing of links to their content. Examples of these are tcrn.ch (TechCrunch) and digg.com (Digg). Web sharing services have also joined in the fun, a recent example being shar.es (ShareThis).

Here at Propeller we have secured the domain pplr.us and will be launching our own URL shortener shortly. However, up until today, we did not accept shortened URLs as Propeller story submissions. I'm happy to report that we now accept shortened URLs. Story submission has not changed at all to accommodate this--simply submit the shortened URL, and we will save the original ("lengthened") URL as the source of the story.

So for example, a recent Propeller Week In Review blog post has the following URL:

http://blog.propeller.com/2009/06/05/propeller-week-in-review-greatest-hits-edition/

Using the tr.im URL shortener, the alias for the above URL is:

http://tr.im/nyv6

As of today, you can now submit tr.im URLs (as well as any other URL shortening service). Simply enter the shortened URL (in this case, http://tr.im/nyv6) into the URL box. Propeller will then save the story with the lengthened blog.propeller.com URL.

And that's it! Let us know if you have any questions.

Happy shortening,
Tom (member tdrapeau)

P.S. Follow Propeller on Twitter!