As you may know, it’s possible these days to use a custom domain for short URLs. That is, rather than using popular but generic URL shorteners like tinyurl.com or bit.ly, you can set up your own, more personalized domain, so that short URLs that you create reflect your website, your company, or yourself.
We thought this sounded fun. So we have set up the bmg.ma domain for this purpose. It reflects us (get it? BMG plus .ma for Massachusetts?), plus it’s nice and short, as a URL shortener should be. The actual URL shortening is done through our account at bit.ly, so bmg.ma itself simply maps to bit.ly. But the short URLs on the bmg.ma domain can map directly to whatever long URL we want. For instance, want to know how to get to the State House? Here’s a Google map: http://bmg.ma/9FlQNX
Henceforth, our twitterfeed (which automatically tweets every new BMG front-page post, and if you use Twitter but don’t follow us, you should!) will send out short URLs on the bmg.ma domain. We’ll also drop bmg.ma shortened URLs into posts, when we’re inspired to do so. At the moment, unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be possible to open things up so that you, too, can create bmg.ma short URLs. If that changes, though, we’ll let you know!
After all, the m in bmg is redundant when you add the ma suffix.
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2. blue.ma is longer.
3. blue.ma doesn’t as readily identify us. I like having “BMG” right in the name. The redundancy doesn’t bother me.