Lessons learned before the launch of Brief.ly

It was a long path. Our first experiment was a pilot project Of-Cour.se! The idea was to have a blogging platform like that of WordPress, just with jingly URLs. For example Joking.Of-Cour.se/ or Nespresso.What-El.se – the web address was meant to become a sentence, even a slogan.

We realised that technology is there already for years. What we needed was a strong marketing and this did not come for free. Of course we were promoted on many sites, blogs, and social networks, – but that was not enough to ring the bells.

Throughout 2009 we experimented with different features, more blogs, more posts and more PR. The pilot grew into Name.ly project with the mission to help people sorting out their multiple online profiles, sites, pages, etcetera.

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In addition to link bundling services (Many.at, Brief.ly, Links2.Me), Name.ly also offers a plugin that will automate link bundling on all WordPress sites.

The plugin simply does the following:

1. It scans every post and / or page and finds all embedded references.

2. Then it groups those links into bundles ready to be opened with a single click.

3. Finally, at post’s bottom, it inserts bundles, by clicking on which the site administrators and visitors can check out all links in much timely manner.

Links2Tabs in action

One would want to ask: “why do I need it?”

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Name.ly keeps innovating even during the hot summer times. This month we released two plugins for WordPress that can be handy for any site:

• Feed2Tabs
• Links2Tabs

Feed2Tabs allows adding widgets and shortcodes that will automatically open recent feed items in tabs with just one single click. Feed2Tabs can also me used as a stand-alone service. The plugin itself makes it easy to add Feed2Tabs widgets to any WordPress blog.

Links2Tabs bundles references at the bottom of each post and/or page, allowing to open/check all of them with one single click. An example of such bundle can be below.