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You’re Doing That Wrong is a journal of various successes and failures by Dan Sturm.

Custom URL Redirects with Rebrandly and Keyboard Maestro

For better or worse, the primary way I share files with clients, other artists, whomever, is sending Dropbox links. With features like password protection and link expiration, Dropbox links are pretty great. But there are two areas where they fail: one, they’re long and ugly, and two, they’re absolute and unable to be redirected to a different file after you’ve shared them.

Yes, in a perfect world I wouldn’t notice problems with my files after I hit send on my emails. Luckily, I can mitigate embarrassing link misfires by creating a custom short URL redirect that I can change later if necessary.

Redirect, Your Honor

I own a couple of short domain names I’ve used to create custom redirects for years. I used to create the redirects directly in the Hover domain dashboard. Which, as you can probably imagine, is not the quickest process.

Recently, however, I was introduced to Rebrandly by my pals Jeff Hodges and Zach Hobesh. Rebrandly is a service for creating and managing custom shortened URL redirects. It connects to your domains quickly and easily, and makes re-branding URLs super easy.

When creating a shortened URL redirect with Rebrandly, the three 1 main components are:

  1. The destination URL
  2. The shortened URL path, which Rebrandly calls a “Slashtag”
  3. A short description of the link, for organizational purposes

Rebrandly’s API documentation is full of example code that made it very easy for me to create a Keyboard Maestro macro that uses their service for shortening my links.

Wrkflw

Creating a rebranded URL with the macro is as simple as:

  1. Place the destination URL on the clipboard.
  2. Press the keyboard shortcut.

A dialogue box will pop up, prefilling the destination URL from the clipboard. There are 2 optional input fields for the Slashtag and the Description. If left blank, Rebrandly will create a random Slashtag that's as short as possible.

Pressing Return will create the shortened URL on Rebrandly, and place it on my clipboard, ready to be pasted into my email, Slack message, or wherever.

I’ve only been using Rebrandly and this Keyboard Maestro macro for a short time, but I’ve been very happy with how fast and easy it makes rebranding URLs.

  1. Technically, the Slashtag and the Description are optional. ↩