Blog

How much is the phish?

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Image by Pete Linforth/Pixabay

What a month!

As soon as we went live and started getting user traction, we at once.to got confronted with an unexpected problem.

Pretty soon we’ve discovered that our super-fast, super-convenient short links were actively used by phishers.

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Be social: login via Google, Facebook, Twitter

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Photo by Firmbee/Pixabay.

Signing up with a service is always a bit of a hassle: you need to type in your email, come up with a password, then spend awhile choosing a password that’s actually accepted. Some services would also require you to type your password twice (no idea what for).

Everyone has social network accounts (even when they claim they don’t), so why waste time registering?

As of today, you can now easily log into once.to using your Google, Facebook, or Twitter account!

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Better than beta

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Original photo by randomhh/Pixabay, with alterations.

A big day for the world’s fastest URL shortener: once.to carries no “beta” label as of today!

After three months in the public beta mode, no major shortcomings have been identified, so it’s time to celebrate.

On this occasion we offer a 25% discount for our customers — read on for the coupon code!

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Use Them Man! UTM parameters and their friends

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Photo of sea urchin by Sophia Nel/Pixabay.

UTM parameters are ubiquitous on today’s Internet. You must have seen those awkward-looking tokens like utm_source and utm_medium in URLs you came across.

They are so popular that they’ve become a de-facto standard for link analytics and performance tracking. That is, despite the fact hardly anyone knows what “UTM” stands for — and no, that’s not “Use Them Man”.

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Maintaining the HTTP status quo

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Short links have just got better!

If you’ve been in the short-link business a while, you must have heard of things like permanent and temporary redirect.

Those who are good with numbers can also remember the magic numbers of 301 and 302 (and a few others).

Well, these are more than just numbers. HTTP status codes are important for SEO and correct functioning of your shortened URLs.

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On the subject of QR codes

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Photo by Xavier Turpain/Pixabay.

These days you find QR codes everywhere: in brochures and newspapers, on clothes and kitchenware, on walls and windows, and even on lawns. Some of them are neat and small and some huge and unwieldy.

Did you ever ask yourself why that is?

Well, the explanation is quite simple. The number of “pixels” in a QR code depends on two things: its content and the error correction level applied.

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Shall we start over again?

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Photo by Werther mx/CC BY-SA 3.0/Wikimedia Commons

Sometimes you just need to undo all you’ve done and start over again, from scratch. From a blank slate. A tabula rasa.

It may not always be possible (hardly ever is, actually), but at least we at once.to have you covered!

You can now manually reset any link’s statistics and wipe the gathered data out of existence.

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Smart links and link rules

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Photo by Lennart Bruchhaus/Pixabay.

URL shortening will never be the same.

Today we at once.to announce a massive feature that has just been rolled out: smart links!

This new feature opens limitless possibilities of tailoring the behaviour of your short links to your needs. From now on, you can choose the destination URL based on the visitor’s country, browser, device type, language, and other characteristics.

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