Chrome Extension Archives

Alternatives to Google Url Shortener

March 8, 2019March 7, 2019 Tim Leave a comment

About a year ago, Google announced they would be shutting down their URL shortener service March 30, 2019. Goo.gl has been around since 2009. This is unfortunate because so many people rely on goo.gl for creating short links. Bit.ly is a good choice if you need to shorten a few URLs, but once you go over the free plan (10,000 a month), you have to upgrade to their enterprise edition which cost around $1,000 a month.

Fortunately, there are a few free options such as tinyurl, is.gd, to.ly, and cutt.ly. Also, there are extensions such as Link Shortener, that allow you to shorten links in one click using multiple different shorteners. If you have a need to shorten URLs, give Link Shortener a try!

How to Manually Update Google Chrome Extensions

August 23, 2018August 23, 2018 Tim 1 Comment

Chrome is my browser of choice primarily because of the speed and extensions. Extensions allow you to extend the functionality of your browser. One of my favorites is Weather Extension.

I often have users asking how to get updates immediately. For the most part, extensions should auto-update pretty regularly but in some cases, you may want to manually choose when you update an extension. Luckily chrome makes this easy. Read More

Vue Skycons

August 20, 2018August 23, 2018 Tim 2 Comments

I’m a big fan of the weather icons from Dark sky called Skycons. They are animated and are easy to customize. I wanted to be able to use them in my Weather and WeatherTab extensions which are written using VueJs. I decided to write a Vue plugin to make them easier to use with Vue. Like most things in Vue, plugins are simple to create. Check out the source code on GitHub. Read More

How to Unshorten Short Urls

July 2, 2018July 1, 2018 Tim Leave a comment

Several months ago I created a site called LinkUnshorten with the goal to guard people against short links from sites like goo.gl, bit.ly, tinyurl etc. Url shorteners are great but they do have the risk of redirecting you to a site you may not want to visit. LinkUnshorten solves this issue by expanding short links to show you the final redirect URL. I also made a chrome extension that will detect short links. Read More