🎉 JUST LAUNCHED!! http://st33m.it -- FREE custom URL shortener PLUS stats and analytics, EXCLUSIVELY for Steemit articles!

I've JUST finished putting together a fun tool for fellow Steemit users to enjoy: st33m.it!! I've been using Steemit for about a month now and I think it's pretty awesome! After writing a few posts, I thought it would be pretty cool to have a tool that created free custom vanity short URLs... JUST for Steemit articles!

And with that, we'd also get valuable stats & analytics so we could see exactly how/where people were finding our posts! After a little bit of coding (and a little help from my friends) over the past week, I'm proud to finally share http://st33m.it! Here's a screen shot:

You can shorten links without signing up for an account, though if you do create one, you'll be able to easily track the number of views on all of your created short links! Search for previous links, make edits to previous links, easily share links to social media, and more!

Are you sharing your Steemit posts to Facebook? Twitter? Reddit? Steemit.chat? Use a short URL from st33m.it and you can see exactly how many people are clicking over to your page, letting you know exactly how effective your promotions are in each channel. (This will be important to watch if the Facebook algorithms start "magically" making Steemit posts less visible in users' news feeds...)

Four reasons to create your own FREE custom vanity short URLs using st33m.it:

• St33m.it will ONLY redirect to posts from steemit.com!
  No other domains are whitelisted, so readers can click on shortened st33m.it links with confidence that they won't be taken to any malicious sites.
• Short URLs are easier to read and use far less characters!
  Especially important if you're sharing links in a video that you want people to remember or if sending a link via SMS/text message.
• Custom short URLs are nicer looking and MUCH simpler to remember!
  For example, you could take the obnoxiously long URL for my Steem intro post and have a random short URL created like bit.ly does (http://st33m.it/HjycpzN) or you can shorten it with a custom URL like http://st33m.it/randyintro ... a nice mnemonic tool you can easily remember and type out whenever you want to quickly send someone to pages you frequently reference!
• Get stats and analytics! Keep track of all your shortened links and get real-time stats on how many clicks you receive, what countries your readers live in, what website/page they were referred from, and more!

I made st33m.it for YOU! Thank YOU so much for the support!

Steemit really is an incredible tool, and I wanted to provide something of value to the community here, because I already feel like I'm gaining so much from so many of your posts! And I'm waking up excited to start writing for the first time in a long time, thanks to this amazing platform and the inspiring people using it!

If you find value in this tool I've created, I welcome you to show your support by following me... @randyclemens here on Steemit, upvoting this post, and I of course appreciate any/all Steem, Bitcoin, or Ether donations! I'd love to add more features, clean up the interface a little more, add bookmarklets, and more in the near future.

I'm also working on building a media studio in my home with a video podcast room. @jjepic, @newhampshire, and I just recorded the latest episode of Neocash Radio yesterday, we're launching an in-depth video about Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, and blockchains this week! More videos coming soon for Ethereum, Dash, and of course Steemit! We're a small team hoping to find (and pay!) more writers, graphic artists, etc., and every little bit of support helps! THANK YOU!

I'm actually not much of a coder... I only know some HTML and CSS. Big thanks to Your Own URL Shortener -- http://YOURLS.org for the open-source template, and big thanks to my friend Eli Madden at Quicksilver Web Works for helping me with all the PHP! Consider this a beta release; should you find any bugs, please feel free to let me know about them in the comments section. We've both tested it fairly exhaustively, but there's always a chance that a fresh set of eyes will catch something we didn't! And please know that I welcome suggestions for improvements, including ways to make it more secure!

Shorten YOUR first link with st33m.it now!

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About Me!

My name is Randy Clemens and I am the author of The Sriracha Cookbook, The Veggie-Lover’s Sriracha Cookbook, and co-author of The Craft of Stone Brewing Co. I am a graduate of the California School of Culinary Arts and am featured in the award-winning Sriracha—a documentary film by Griffin Hammond.

In early 2015, I moved from Los Angeles to participate in the Free State Project, a geopolitical movement getting 20,000+ libertarians to relocate to New Hampshire to decrease the size and draconian reach of the government while protecting individual liberties.

You can read more about me on my Steemit introduction post! And if one (or more) of the things I've written about here tickles your fancy, you can follow my musings on Twitter via @SrirachaBook and @RandyClemensEsq.