We are very happy to announce the Fuel.bz url shortening service, rolling out across all the FUEL Brand Network sites.

The idea was first thrown into the ring by Fuel Your Coding Editor Jerod Santo, in an effort to help establish and maintain the FUEL brand across the Internet. With the increase in social media there is a need to condense often incredibly long urls, especially with Permalinks to specific articles, into as short as space as possible. This need is especially true for anyone sharing links over Twitter. Which we do, all of the FUEL Brand sites run their own Twitter accounts.

Jerod offered up not just the idea but also his expertise. Just over a week after the initial idea (and the overwhelmingly positive response from other members of the FUEL editing team) he had written the custom url shortener, able to integrate with our custom WordPress theme (thanks Doug!) and dashboard, so that (as you can see from the screenshot) the short url is generated upon hitting the Publish button.

Now all that was left was for a suitable domain to be found and bought! Turns out FUEL already owned fuelify.me and fuelifyme.com, but more were looked into. After many suggestions from the FUEL team (some good, some not so good… Fuel Your Blogging Editor Brandon Cox suggested fuelbrandnetworkshorturl.co.uk!) it was announced that Fuel.bz had been purchased.

Keep your eyes on Fuel Your Coding, where Jerod will hopefully be featuring the workings of the url shortener in an upcoming article. It was, in his words, “… a fun little project, and clocks in at under 70 lines of code…”.

The Fuel.bz service went live at the beginning of June. Look out for Fuel.bz “shortys” out roaming the wilds of the Internet, and be sure to click on them for some awesome articles on all that the FUEL brand has to offer!