Droplr Drops Into My Workflow

 I use bit.ly as a part of one of my most regular workflows: posting links to /Message posts onto Twitter. [disclosure: bit.ly is a client, and I have a financial interest in the company.] bit.ly is optimized for exactly that sort of URL publishing (or link journalism) and the statistical tallying of references and clicks. Here’s my bit.ly account display:

So, as a part of my write/publish/tweet workflow it’s a great help. I find that I am using Postrank in this way as well, seeing which posts are gaining the most references and reads, although it crashes just ofter enough to be annoying.

However, there are a number of other everyday activities where I have either incorporated other URL shorteners, or would, if they added a bit more functionality.

Droplr

Droplr is a lightweight URL shortener that I use everyday. It has one feature set that saves me a few minutes every time I use it, in comparison with how I did things before adopting Droplr.

Droplr runs as a application on Mac OS X, and allows me to take screenshots — either the entire screen or a region, and then it automatically uploads the image to a web-based repository and copies a short URL to the clipboard. Since I am forever taking screenshots and then posting them somewhere, this is extremely helpful, since I no longer have to cleanup a folder or my desktop by deleting images.

One problem is that the short URL created does not point to the image, per se, but rather to a page on which the image is displayed along with an ad.

I would really link to be able to upgrade to a pro account, and avoid the ad page altogether. As it is, I cannot, so I have to paste the URL into the browser, open the page with the ad and then select the ‘copy image location’ to get the URL for the image alone. For example, I pasted a link like that for the image above in the Squarespace editor, using the ‘direct URL’ option of Squarespace.

The strange thing is that I wind up using Droplr in this way to get at a long URL!

Droplr also supports plain vanilla URL shortening, and does so in a very simple way: you can just drag a URL from your browser’s URL region and drop it on the Droplt menu item. It converts the URL to a short one, and places it in your clip buffer. Very simple and fast. It also records these URLs and the images uploaded for later retrieval, but has limited stats, namely, clicks but no listing of Twitter references:

And since I am principally uploading images this way, I would really like to see a thumbnail of the images, and those are displayed by clicking on the icon second from the left at the top.

You can also drag images from web pages onto the Droplr menu entry and they are uploaded, and a short URL is generated which can be helpful in some circumstances. This is less useful for me since in general if some image is interesting enough to share I would simply post it to one of my mazillion blogs, and then share the link to the blog post.

Near the top of the screenshot above you can see an entry with the text ‘I guess you could act like these were like blog posts.’ This is a Droplr note: in essence, you can create a text note — with formatting support for Markdown, Code, or plain text — which is uploaded and then accessed by the created URL. It’s a bit strange, since the note can’t be edited after the first creation. Looks like a tool for people to share text, or to perhaps write notes that are too large for twitter but to pass the URLs via Twitter? At any rate, it is a feature that I am not using.

Conclusions

Droplr has become a very useful tool in my daily work. Some of it’s functionality — like the text notes — I hardly use at all, but the ability to quickly snap an image of some region of my screen and have it uploaded in the background saves me hours of fiddling every week.

If they would only let me pay for a no-ad version, I would save an additional hour a week, I bet.