In this short article, I'll share how I use the link shortener short.io and a custom domain to improve the reading experience of people buying my printed books.

Avoiding dead links with redirects from a link shortener

In my books of the Service Design Principles series, I have a lot of references to articles, books, videos, and more. In fact, in the volume 4, I have 151 references in it that bring people to a website.

Inspired by a conversation with Marc Fonteijn, I started a few years ago to use a link shortener for each link so that if the original website changes its link or dies, I can still change where the URL shortener brings people.

In that way, there are no dead links in my books, as I can always change manually where a link I've created redirects.

Up until now, I've used the subdomain extra.swissinnovation.academy to make it a more branded experience. Until now, I've let the link shortener I use automatically generate a short random link, for example, extra.swissinnovation.academy/s2ry.

The problem with print books

This is all great for digital books, where you can simply click a link, and it brings you to the right place. But for print books, that's a lot of stuff to type in your browser.

So, for the fifth volume in the Service Design Principles series, I've decided to do a bit of extra work to:

• make the links even shorter

• make them easier to type

Buying a new custom domain to make the links even shorter

So I've bought via my domain provider, ovh.com, a new super short custom domain swis.ac, which is short for Swiss Innovation Academy. When looking for such a domain, my criteria were:

• It should be super short

• It should remember people of the brand

• It should be at a price that's reasonable (many of these super short domains cost thousands of dollars)

Adding by hand and sometimes with AI help ends that make sense

What comes after the domain, for example, "blueprint" in swis.ac/blueprint is something that was previously automatically generated. But when that last part is something like "s2ry" it gets pretty annoying to type, especially when written in small letters like "L, i, l, 1" all look the same.

So now I take a few extra seconds to find a short word that makes sense with the reference to use as the link.

The URL shortener service I use also has a feature that, about a quarter of the time, suggests a good short name that makes sense by using AI and looking at the original URL name.

What's the free URL shortener I use?

I've been using short.io to shorten my links for free. It's a pretty great tool in which you can even add several custom domains to use for shortening URLs.

What could I do next?

If, in the next months or years, I have some extra time, I might revisit all the previous books to change all the short URLs with the new domain and with new ends in the links that are easy to type.

But for now, I'm focusing this effort on the fifth volume of the Service Design Principles series.