Bit.ly kinda sucks, doesn't it

Until a while ago, bit.ly for me was something I was vaguely aware of and occasionally used to shorten links. When I started using IFTTT (an awesome service everyone should be using), I browsed the available channels and checked some out at random. Bit.ly looked promising, so I registered and started adding links. My main goal was to hook everything up via IFTTT, so all the content I gather from various services gets bookmarked in a single place for later viewing. (More on that in a future post, maybe.)

My most used recipe. (Update Dec 2019 - the old picture is lost. Replacing with this one.)

I liked its simplicity. Big, clear types, lots of space, simple usage. But very soon I hit a brick wall, when I added anywhere between 5 and 30 links throughout the day, and wanted to read a similar number in the evening. Very soon I found out that the way Bit.ly displays your bookmarks is really obnoxious. When I tried to find an article that would match my mood, I found myself scrolling endlessly through a long list of stuff I didn’t care about at the moment whilst getting annoyed by the weird way the bookmark list is updated. Pretty soon I realized that this just wasn’t a way to go, looked for an alternative and settled with Pocket for now, but that’s a different story.

But hey, I thought, maybe I’ve been doing it wrong! From now on, I’ll just use it to store links I wanted to share with people. But that only worked until I found out what a terrible mess the Bit.ly RSS feed is. Why is it so hard to just put my links in, along with their titles and descriptions and be done with it? Who wants to see my username, the shortened url, the original url and an url for stats, instead of the description?

So, as of today, I’m looking for something else that will do the same job.