Using Vanity URLs for Stability and Easier Sharing
In developing business, most of my time is spent scheduling and attending meetings. The scheduling part can get time-consuming, so I’m always on the lookout for software tools to make this easier.
After much experimentation, I’ve landed on Calendly, which I’ve been using for the 12 months or so. The service creates a URL which you can share with prospective meeting attendees. It looks like this: https://calendly.com/cylinder
The link goes to a page which offers a few different meeting types. For me, these are geographically distinct, meaning “meet in “Oakland”, “meet in San Francisco”, or “Have some sort of not-in-person meeting”.
Pretty cool, right? It doesn’t matter what happens afterward other than it makes my availability super easy to discover and when you book a time, it creates a calendar invitation.
Phase 1: Use the URL
So I’m off to the races and giving this URL to people, and I start noticing something. People can’t spell “Calendly” if I tell them the URL using my voice. If I send a link by email or text, it’s easy enough to click on correctly, but I got a lot of questions about this service and what it was doing. I wanted the recipient to focus on our meeting, now how we were getting there.
I decided to create a forwarding URL, mostly for vanity purposes and kind of to see if it would work.
Phase 2: Add a vanity redirect
I wanted the URL to be related to my company marketing site, cylinder.digital. I also wanted it to be welcoming, so I decided on cylinder.digital/hello. Friendly, right?
I wanted to redirect to my Calendly page, so I used the power of HTML to do so. The code looks like this:
<head>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; URL='https://calendly.com/cylinder'" />
</head>Now I have a simpler and more presentable URL for sharing.
It had this other side benefit, as pointed out to me by the very smart Justin Reese:
It’s Future-Proof.
That sounds fancy, but it just means “if I change calendar scheduling tools in the future, all the URLs I handed out are always going to be valid.” Maybe it is fancy!
Phase 3: Stop Typing So Much
Now that I have this neat-o URL, I’m sharing it with everyone to network like a boss.
Except I’m typing the exact same text around the url every time. What a waste! Also, hands only have so much mileage on them for typing before real damage kicks in. More also: as a Vim user, it’s hard for me to abide by too much typing.
I decided to use a text expander to type out the text I seem to be writing over and over every day:
My calendar scheduling tool is here: https://cylinder.digital/hello — or you can send me some times which work for you, either way is good for me.
Looking forward to speaking with you!
Best,
Adarsh
(Note: I used the expander to type the above.)
If you are on MacOS, you have some great options like the original TextExpander or aText (I used this for a while), or like me and you’re already using Alfred, try their snippets feature.
If you would actually like to schedule some time to speak with us about your digital transformation, getting help with your software design and development efforts, or just to talk about productivity hacks, use, uh, https://cylinder.digital/hello or email us at hello@cylinder.work.
