Are you an author?  Do you already have an Author Page on Amazon?  If so, you can now get an easy-to-remember, unique URL for your Amazon Author Page.

In other words, you can get a website address like this – http://amazon.com/author/authorname.  Just replace author name with your name.  Pretty cool!

The unique URL is helpful to make it easier for your customers, friends, and colleagues find you and your books.  You could add the unique URL to your blog, LinkedIn profile, Twitter profile, and even Facebook.    Make sure you get your own website address for those other social media sites by following the instructions here (Twitter URL, Facebook URL).

How To Get a Unique Author Page URL on Amazon

Sign into Author Central, click on Profile, then look in the upper right corner for an Author Page URL notice.   Follow the Amazon instructions, and in roughly 30 minutes you’ll have your own personalized URL.

This is available on Amazon.com but not on Amazon.co.uk or other international Amazon sites.  We’re guessing Amazon will roll this out internationally later.

Now authors just need to figure out how to get Amazon Central to list all the newly publish material.

If you’re not already on Author Central, just follow the link above to sign-up.  Here’s a description of what it it and who is eligible – “Author Central includes a variety of tools that allow authors to connect with readers through the submission of photographs, images, written communications and other materials (all materials submitted by you through Author Central, the “Submitted Materials”) for use on or distribution through sites, services or applications that are owned or operated by Amazon or under any Amazon-owned brand (Author Central and these sites, services and applications collectively, the “Services”). You grant to us a license to use the Submitted Materials on the terms provided below, but you otherwise retain all of your rights in your Submitted Materials. Submission to Author Central does not change your ownership of your Submitted Materials.  Submissions of materials to Author Central are tied to authors and may be made only by the individual author and by representatives of the author who have the legal right to act on behalf of the author. If you are not the author or do not have the legal right to act on behalf of the author, you may not submit any materials for that author. You must also be at least 18 years old to use Author Central.”

Firefox 7 was recently put into production.  Firefox 7 makes a big leap in memory handling.    The new version’s memory usage is reduced between 20% and 50% – that’s great.

However, Mozilla also included a shortened URL browser bar that hides the HTTP:// or HTTPS:// for all URLs.  Being able to see the full URL web address is important, so I wish Mozilla wouldn’t have made the change.  The full URL shows if you’re using HTTP or HTTPS, which is important so you know if you’re browsing on a secure site or not.  Obviously you don’t want to provide credit card or other personal details to a non-secured and non-https URL address.  There’s too much hacker risk.

Example of a short URL address without http:// or https:// in Firefox 7

To get the full URL back in Firefox 7 you just simply need to change a configuration setting in the web browser.  Just follow these instructions:

1. In the Firefox 7 URL bar, type about:config
2. Click on the I’ll be careful, I promise! button.
3. Search for browser.urlbar.trimURLs in the Filter field
   
4. Right-click and select Toggle or double-click to change the value from true to false — changes are save immediately after the value is modify.

There you go.  You should now be able to see the full URL address in the browser bar.

I wonder what Mozilla was thinking with this change?  Facebook and Twitter are making big changes to increase secure browsing options, and Mozilla is removing one of the ways to see if a web page is secure or not (see – Facebook SSL certificate or What kind of SSL to buy for Facebook pages).  Comments?

Once you’ve bought an available URL for your new website, there’s another important next step to take:

Go to Twitter, and register the @yourURL that matches your new URL.  Start a Facebook page with the goal of working towards securing the unique Facebook URL Facebook.com/yourURL that also matches your new website name (You will have to wait until you have launched your page and attained 25+ Fans before you can confirm the availability).  Ditto for YouTube and LinkedIN.

Why should you do this right away?  Because your URL will become part of your personal or business branding.  You want your URL’s to match across the different social media sites.  This will help people recognize and find you, which will help you meet your personal or business objectives.  Your personal or business online brand will be stronger if there’s consistency in URLs.

Also, the simpler you can keep your various URL’s, the stronger your association between your brand and your social media sites you will have.

URL’s are a form of digital real estate.  Once someone owns a URL, it’s gone, and not available for someone else to use.  So make sure you create a URL for each of the major social media networks right after purchasing your website address.

URL Branding, More Than Domain Name| Twitter, Facebook, YouTube URLs

So this post isn’t quite URL help or tips.  Well, maybe if the type of help you need is a good laugh.

Who knew there was such a thing as URL or domain name humor?  Apparently there is …

There’s an awesome thread on-going at Reddit called, “Girls Are Like Internet Domain Names“.  A summary of the best LOL comments include:

1. The ones I like are always taken
2. You constantly search for them online
3. You can always get one from an obscure country
4. The best looking ones are too expensive
5. There are still a few out there that nobody’s noticed yet
6. You can always buy them if you have enough money
7. If they are affordable they aren’t worth having
8. The popular ones get too much traffic
9. There are some good ones out there but most of them are stupid

All we need now is one of the Stangel brothers, who both write for David Letterman’s show, to add one more to the list.  This could easily be a Letterman’s Top 10 List!  So come on Eric Stangel and Justin Stangel – do your magic.

Domain Name Humor| How Women Are Like Online URL Addresses via Reddit

Web Hosting and URL addresses or domain names are different services and products. However, web hosting and URL website addresses need each other to work and accomplish what each is intended to do.

A URL address is like a name or a label. You can’t store files used in the creation and display of a website with just a URL address (domain). You need web hosting as storage space for your website files and content. A web host also connects to the internet so the combination of URL website address plus website files on your web host can be seen by the whole world.

It’s analogous to a can of Coke. The Coke label of “Coca-Cola” can’t be used to store the Coke, it is the can itself stores the Coke. The label is the URL address, the can is the web host. The same label can be stuck to any bottle the manufacturer wants.

Because a URL or domain name and web hosting are separated, the benefit is that once you become the rightful owner of the “label”, you can choose whatever “bottle” you want. Coca cola can choose whatever bottle they want. If you are the rightful owner of a domain name, you can choose whatever web host you want and you can change your web host anytime you want. In other words, if you buy a domain at GoDaddy, you can use web hosting at HostGator for example.

Gaining the rights to a URL address, assuming it’s an available URL address, is as easy as paying a registration fee for each year you control the domain. You can always renew the URL before the URL expires. If you need web hosting, find the best website hosting services company here.

Hackers and Spammers have started building fake short URL tools to beat email and other computer security to get more email traffic to their spam sites, Symantec has reported in its May 2011 Report.


Symantec said they’ve seen a new security evasion technique that works by embedding a legitimate short URL, which in turn points to a short URL system set up by the scammers. This adds an extra layer to beat security filters. The traffic then is directed to the final website, which is usually a scam or spam site.

Spammers have even started buying new URL addresses well ahead of when they will be used to avoid domain analysis (URls used for fraud and span are often very recently registered, legitimate URLs have aged a while before they’re used). A lot of the new short URL scams are running on .ru URLs.

“With legitimate URL-shortening services attempting to tackle abuse more seriously, spammers seem to be experimenting with ways to establish their own services to better avoid disruption,” said Paul Wood, MessageLabs Intelligence senior analyst. “However, as long as new URL-shortening services are being created, we expect spammers to continue abusing them.”

“What is unique about the new URL-shortening sites is that the spammers are treating them as ‘stepping stones’ – a link between public URL-shortening services and the spammers’ own sites,” he said.

New Short URL Tools| Built By Spammers To Beat Security for Malware

Each time we surf the internet, we see URLs. Anytime we need to go to a specific web page, we use URLs. Yet, we rarely ever stop to think what exactly a URL is.

Here’s a crash course to help define and understand what a URL address is –


A uniform resource locator or URL specifies where a resource is available on the web and how to retrieve it. By typing in a specific series of letters and numbers in the address bar of a browser, you immediately go to a website (address in a virtual world) to obtain information.

Every URL has the same naming convention:

* The protocol
* A colon
* A hostname or IP address
* A port number
* The path to be accessed
* An optional anchor (for HTML) or query string (for CGI)

The protocol indicates the namespace or purpose in addition to the syntax of the remaining part of the URL. For instance, http://example.com. The hostname or IP address specifies the destination location for the URL. For example, google.com is the domain name and 72.14.207.99 is the IP address. It’s easier to remember the domain name as opposed to the IP address.

The port number is optional and if omitted, default port of 80 is used. By stating a specific port, it tells the browser to connect to a certain port on that server. The path to be accessed is used to find the specific resource requested. Since this aspect is case sensitive, if entered in uppercase letters, an HTTP 404 error will occur.

Finally, the anchor for an HTML website refers to a location on the actual web page. On the other hand, the query string used to for CGI websites holds data that is to be passed along to specific web applications like CGI programs. Query strings are generally separated by ampersands while names and values are separated by an equal sign.

There you have it. You now know the syntax of a URL, which may be beneficial when working or using the internet. Each segment of a URL has a specific purpose that points to a location where information can be retrieved or specific applications can be accessed.

How to Define and Understand What a URL Address Is

Your website’s URL, or web addresses you see in the web browser bar, is a factor that Google and other search engines look at in deciding what pages to display during a web search.

That was a mouthful of a sentence. But, it’s true. So don’t just focus on meta tags and content. An optimized URL can help you rank better in search engines.

Here’s some information on how to optimize website address URLs:

Domain Name Keywords

Your domain name is part of your web site page URLs, obviously. SEO experts recommend including the main keywords you’re targeting in your domain name. This will help your site’s website rankings because if your domain contains keywords, it a powerful sign to Google that your website is related to the keywords and has a good chance of being a good match for a search with the same keywords.

For example, if you are trying to attract people who need a locksmith in Salt Lake City, Utah, the domain name: saltlakelocksmith.com would be ideal. However, it is very unlikely that such a high quality domain name like that wouldn’t already owned by someone. If you can’t convince the current domain owner to sale it to you, or don’t have enough money to buy a premium domain, you may go with a longer domain – but not too long. Maybe something like saltlakecityutahlocksmith.com will still be available for purchase. Just remember your customers need to remember the domain name as well, so don’t pick a domain name that’s too long (and saltlakecityutahlocksmith.com is definitely on the long side). Many SEO experts will buy domain names like this specifically to build a network of sites that can dominate a niche.

Web Page URL Optimization

Once you have your main URL you can then start optimizing your page URLs, which are the web addresses of the pages on your site. The best way to optimize your page URLs for the search engines is to make sure your targeted keywords are in the URL of the page. For example, if your page is about commercial locksmith services, then an optimal page URL would be saltlakelocksmith.com/Commercial-Locksmith-Services. This would be the perfect URL to target such a phrase, and you would help you rank higher if someone searched Google for “commercial locksmith services” in Salt Lake. Notice the main domain does not contain dashes, while the page address contains dashes between the words. This is because search engines lend less credence to sites with dashes in their main domain name, where as the page URL needs to have dashes to separate the actual words. Since page URLs can be very long the search engines prefer to read the page URL with hyphens.

How To Optimize Website Address URLs

I knew there had to be more to the Kate Middleton jelly bean URL story. So here’s the deal: Independent’s URLs can be spoofed. You can alter the URL slug, but as long as you keep the number at the end of the URL the same, the URL will still go to the originally intentioned page. Here’s some examples of spoofed Independent URLs that will resolve to the Kat Middleton story:

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/the-future-king-is-going-bald-like-a-jelly-bean-2269573.html

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/kate-middleton-is-to-skinny-to-eat-jelly-beans-2269573.html

URLs with keywords are important for search engine optimization. So, it looks like the tech team for the Independent (and other news sites -see below) has made their content management system work this way. The URL with keywords will 301 redirect to the original SEO unfriendly URL with numbers. This helps get more traffic from search engines like Google, and traffic pays the news bills via website advertising.

Here’s examples of other spoofed news URLs (these aren’t real, just created to show the point):

Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obama-was-born-in-kenya/2011/04/18/AFUFQN2D_story.html

St. Petersburg Times: http://www.tampabay.com/news/publicsafety/fire/obama-was-born-in-kenya/1164650

The Harvard Journalism lab thinks there may be libel issues with spoofed URLs, so it wouldn’t surprise me if the IT teams for these sites update their CMS code. The tricky part will be updating for only future stories, and not existing URLs. If existing URL structure is changed, it could have a direct impact to the sites natural traffic. The existing keyword friendly URLs are indexed in Google. If the URL slug structure is updated to avoid spoofing, and it’s not done correctly, all the old indexed URLs could resolve to 404 pages. Once the Google spider sees this, it will remove the URL from their index and it won’t get shown in searches.

How To Spoof CMS URL| Spoofing URLs

There’s a new little start-up out there called Voyurl. It’s still in beta, so the service isn’t ready to rock and roll yet. You can sign-up with your email address, and they’ll send you a note when they launch. Once the launch happens and you’re signed-in, apparently you install a browser extension in Firefox, Chrome or Safari, it Voyurl tracks your every move and automatically posts your history on the web. You’re free to look at the browsing history of all users in a Twitter-like timeline, and you can follow specific users as well ala Twitter.

Basically Voyurl will allow you to see what URLs people are visiting in real-time. The folks whose browser history is public on the site have agreed to this fact, of course. Voyurl’s tagline is, “it’s ok to look”.

Internet surfers that share their browsing history will be able to turn off the service when they want to, but you know folks will forget to click that “off” button. In addition, the company says you’ll be able to set filters on what you show and don’t. So are you dumb, errr, gutty enough to not set the remove the porn filter?

Honestly, I’m not sure if I get it. Is Voyurl just trying to make some sort of privacy point about how much information Google already has on you? If they move towards the social dynamics of purchases and recommendations, then it would make more sense to me. But I’m not sure that’s their intent. It seems like they’re trying to be a tangential play on Twitter’s success.

Perhaps someone from the company would leave a comment for us. Please tell us more Adam Leibsohn. Or any readers, would you use this service?

How To See What URLs People Are Visiting in Real Time