Seeing links shortened with Bit.ly but not sure how to do that? This tutorial walks you through setting up Bit.ly, step-by-step so that you, too can post links to your wall, email or your favorite link-sharing group.
A lot of farmers are posting links nowadays. Some use links to post bonuses to groups, and some post links in order to avoid having their bonuses appear in feed aggregators or collected by snagging applications.
Whatever your reason for posting a link, you need to know that Facebook has a limit of 420 characters when posting something as a status - so if you're posting a link, you will probably want to shorten it first. If you try and post a FarmVille link that's too long, either the link will not post at all, or what does post becomes uncollectable.
There are many link shortening services available. For several reasons, I prefer using a service called 'Bit.ly'.
This may all SEEM like a lot of work, but it's really just a matter of a few simple steps one time, and then it's set up for you permanently. You'll be saving yourself hours of work in the long run, and we'll walk you through what you need to do, step by step.
In order to use Bit.ly to shorten links, you first need to type "http://bit.ly" into your browser's address bar. This will bring up a screen that looks like this:
While it's perfectly okay to use bit.ly without signing up for an account (they're free), I strongly recommend signing up for an account, since that opens up many features that are unavailable to you if you use bit.ly without an account. So, just click where it says to sign up, and follow bit.ly's instructions for creating an account. Once you do, and return to the bit.ly website, you'll see a screen similar to this one:
This is my own bit.ly account. As you can see, it keeps track of things I've already shortened, so I can get back to them if need be. This is also where you can peek at some interesting data, such as how many times your links were clicked on (this is NOT the same as finding out if your link was collected), where the 'clickers' come from, etc. Lots of nifty data for those who are interested in that sort of thing.
We're not really concerned with all that at the moment, however. What we want to do at this point is to go to the bottom of this page. In the lower left hand corner, you'll see a collection of links that look like this:
You want to click on the 'tools' link here. It brings up a page that shows various tools you can use. The one we're after is called an extension. Extensions help you put a little extra feature into your browser. In the case of bit.ly, we have an extension for Firefox and Chrome. If you use IE, this isn't going to be available to you, but you can still use bit.ly from http://bit.ly - it's just a bit more cumbersome.
Scroll down the 'tools' page about halfway, and you'll see the browser extensions section.
Click on the link for either Firefox or Chrome (depending on which browser you use to farm), and follow their instructions for installing the extension. Once you've installed it, you will want to close out your browser and re-start it for the extension to take effect.
Now that we've installed our browser extension (you'll never have to do ANY of this again, unless you need to reinstall the extension for some reason), let's post a shortened link!
It seems I've managed to breed a sheep in FarmVille English Countryside, and I'm about to share milk bottles with everyone. This same method will work for ANYTHING you want to share in FarmVille - I'm just using the sheep as an example, but it works the same way for foals, trees, water, seedlings, eggs, etc.
Click on the share button, just like you would normally. It brings up this familiar Facebook Posting dialog box:
Next, we're going to right-click on the line of text that's bolded - the one that says 'John's baby lamb, Olive Ewe, is growing quickly!'. This is where the 'collect' link is located. Clicking on the photo isn't going to work. When you right click on that line, you'll see a new option you've not seen before: "Shorten and copy with bit.ly":
That's the option you want to select. It does two important things:
- It takes the underlying link and shortens it.
- It copies the shortened link to your windows clipboard.
All in one click. Nifty, no? You CAN proceed now directly to pasting this link wherever you like - a group, your own wall, in chat, a message, etc. I'm going to show you how to safeguard your post in case you're one of those safety-minded people who like to wear a belt AND suspenders!
This next step is optional but I usually do this just for the sake of safety. We're going to change the security on this posting so that only you can see it (it'll appear on your own wall). Click on the little 'lock' icon on the post and you'll see these choices:
You'll want to select 'Custom Edit' here. This brings up yet another window:
Scroll down and select 'Only Me', and then 'save setting'. This means nobody but you can see this Facebook posting on your wall.
You can make sure this 'took' by hovering your cursor over the lock icon in the posting box. It should say 'Only Me' as shown here:
Why do all this? Why go through all this setting-changing stuff? An abundance of caution. It preserves your posting on your wall, privately, so you can get back to it if you need it for some reason. If your power goes out or your PC locks up in the middle of all this, you're going to lose your post, so for this reason I save all mine to my own wall, locked down like this so only I can see them.
(It is 100% optional. When you right-click a link and select 'Shorten and copy with bit.ly' as we did above, you CAN skip publishing the post altogether and go right to pasting your shortened link somewhere.)
Once you've done that, click on 'Publish' as usual. We don't need that dialog box anymore now.
Please note that if you did NOT change the security settings on this post to 'Only Me', it's likely that this posted to the game feed and that your 'bonus' has already been collected. This is why we make that change - so it does NOT show up in the game feed - we're going to post that shortened link instead! This is the number-one common mistake that people make when trying to share links instead of game posts.
Where IS that shortened link? It's still on your Windows Clipboard, remember? We can now post this shortened link anywhere we like - in a group, to your own wall, in a message, in chat, etc...wherever you like, basically. In this example, I'm going to post this one in a private sharing group run by the good people over at Sharing Foals and Calves, called "Farmers Unlimited".
So, when you've decided where you want to post YOUR bonus, you'll go to enter it in the status box, something like this:
What I've done here is typed 'Baby Bottles' (and a space afterwards so that it doesn't all run together) to label my wall post, and then I right-clicked so I can select 'paste'. Paste means you're copying the contents of the Windows Clipboard (which contains the shortened link we created earlier) to the dialog box so you can post this link in a group.
This just happens to be a group post - you could also choose to post this in a private message, chat, or on your own wall - just put it where you'd normally put a status update on Facebook.
When you select 'paste', it'll look something like this:
At this point, all you have to do is click on 'Share', and you're done. You've shared a shortened link!
One other nifty feature of that 'extension' we installed earlier? When you hover over a bit.ly link, you get information that shows up - it shows you the original, non-shortened link (so you know you're clicking on something that's SAFE), and it also shows you how many times people have clicked on it:
While this does not mean that a bonus is 100% consumed, if something's been clicked 15 times, you can usually assume it's all gone and move on to the next one. That's a nice time-saver!
So...while it may SEEM like a lot of work, once you walk yourself through these steps once or twice, pretty soon you'll be posting shortened links in your sleep, with your eyes closed and with one hand tied behind your back!
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