Use Bit.ly Pro Now

Many of us woke up this morning to an email from Bit.ly. In it contained instructions to change the A Record for our short url. Eager to begin using the Pro features, I eagerly changed it, then checked my Bit.ly account. Nothing looked different, I shortened a couple urls, still had the bit.ly domain on them.

Well, that confusion was cleared up in a 2nd email tonight. The Bit.ly Pro site should roll out later this week.

The DNS settings (A-Record or CNAME) detailed in the previous email are steps you can take before the site launches. Sorry if our last email was unclear, and thanks for your patience!

Being the impatient geek that I am though, I learned a trick earlier today. You can start using Bit.ly Pro now. We don’t have access to the official site yet, but we can use our domain.

I purchased ttdu.de nearly a month ago, which now that I’ve changed the A Record, redirects to bit.ly. But if you manually adjust it, it already works with shortned urls. Take my post from earlier this week, Proper Date Conduct: How To Treat Ladies Right. It shortens to bit.ly/9vIf24. But if you swap in ttdu.de for bit.ly, leaving you with ttdu.de/9vIf24, you’ll find that it still goes to the right post. 

There is a catch though. I have found that when putting it into Tweetdeck, it will still take it and shorten it into a bit.ly url. The trick there is to add your custom url by itself, and then add the http:// in front of it.

I still eagerly await the full featured back end, but for now, I can start using my custom url.

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