Not so fast! Don’t click that tiny URL yet because it could be malicious. Over the years, Internet users have learned not to follow suspicious links but many blindly follow shortened URLs. Scammers, phishers, and affiliate marketers know this and regularly use shortened URLs to bypass security controls and trick unsuspecting users into visiting malicious Web sites. Clicking a malicious URL, whether in its original form or shortened, can infect your computer with malware or worse!

URL shortening services such as TinyURL.com have been around since the early 2000s. Originally designed to make long URLs easier to deal with, URL shortening services are now a must for anyone who uses microblogging sites such as Twitter. After all, with Twitter’s 140 character limit, a single URL quickly fills the entire post. By using a tiny URL, tweeters are able to explain what the link is about. URL shortening services are enjoying a resurrection thanks to Twitter and other microblogging sites.

Because short URLs often mask malicious URLs, smart Twitter users don’t randomly click these links. If the link is from a trusted source, such as CNN, the URL is most likely safe. However, links in re-tweets, from people you do not know, or found via Twitter Search may be suspect. Imagine searching twitter for “free coupon codes” and finding a Tweet with a short URL directing you to a “free coupon codes” Web site. Sounds perfect, right? So you click on the short URL only to find a nasty surprise: pornography, a scam site, or a driveby download.

One way to avoid these surprises is to use a URL expanding service or a URL preview if offered. Several URL expanding services such as ExpandMyURL.com and PrevURL.com allow you to copy and paste the short URL into a text box. Once entered, you will see the long form of the URL and, in some cases, a snapshot of the Web page that the URL represents. Once you see the long URL, you’ll be better able to determine if it is a worthwhile site. For example, a URL such as CNN.com/headlines is legitimate while a URL like HotSexPhotos.com/Priscilla is obviously a porn site.

Another technique is to type the word “preview” in front of the short URL. This works for URLs made with the TinyURL.com service. For example, if the short URL looks like “tinyurl.com/12345,” entering “preview.tinyurl.com/12345″ will take you to the TinyURL.com home page where you will see the original long form of the URL.

An add-on for the Firefox Web browser is also available from LongURLplease.com. This add-on automatically replaces short URLs with the original long URL, allowing you to be better informed before you click.

Short URLs have their place and are becoming extremely popular once again due to the popularity of microblogging. While most short URLs are legitimate links, enough of them point to malicious or pornographic sites. Use common sense and make sure that before you click, you expand the URL.

Be Smart. Be Safe.

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Hello, my favorite geeky gyrls! This is my first post here at GeekGyrls.com and I thought I’d start out with a new monthly feature of the best geeky tips and toys that I come across so you too can be an early adopter. I’ll strive to compile my own personal geeky finds and spare you the drudgery of hunting them down yourselves. I’ll highlight gadgets, online services and tips on using some of our most valued tools in our business and life. If you ever come across something truly geeky and would like me to include it, feel free to pop me a direct message at Twitter (I’m @VirtuAllin) or let us know in the comments. And on with the geeky show!

As an entrepreneur, keeping up to date on a broad spectrum of information is critical to staying competitive in today’s business climate. I need to know what challenges my potential clients face, what tools are available to them, how others are succeeding and more. Most of us gain this valuable insight through subscription to blogs using RSS feeds. If you need to know more about RSS, check out this cute and informative YouTube video from commoncraft.

So, I love me some RSS. Paired with my need to take in all that great information is my need to push it right back out to my social network. As you know, social networking for entrepreneurs especially is a vital element to growing your brand and establishing yourself as an authority in your field. Two of the most popular ways of sharing this type of information is by using  Twitter and/or Facebook to push the best and brightest blog posts and news items out to your list of friends/followers.

Now, what has all of this got to do with my favorite geeky tech toys? Exactly this – I’m going to tell you how I accomplish all of the above with some really fantastic time-saving toys. If you’re anything like me, you’ll adore these and will quickly find you can’t live without them.

RSS Reading and Social Sharing

Some of you may already be using Google Reader to keep up with your RSS feeds. Google reader is decidedly simple yet very usable, it’s free and thanks to a flexible system, quite a comprehensive web-based RSS feed reader.

But to take that power and multiply it by 1000 productivity points, you need Feedly. Feedly not only organizes your Google Reader feeds into a beautiful, clean categorized layout but easily allows you to share the best of the best feeds with other Google Reader friends, Twitter, Facebook and much more! Feedly is a Firefox extension, so if you’re still using Internet Explorer (what???) you may want to make a switch.

Feedly also offers the Feedly mini, a fantastic and powerful tiny toolbar that allows you to recommend any and all web pages you happen to discover – on to your community. It also shows you how many conversations that web page or blog post might have sparked up over on Friendfeed.

One of my favorite features in Feedly is the ‘latest’ tab, which displays the posts of the blogs you’re subscribed to as they’re published. This lets you read and share the hottest and most interesting stuff before everyone else. The first person to post hot news on Twitter is often the one that gets the most ‘RTs’ or ‘Re-Tweets’ and thus more visibility for your brand.

Another fantastic feature is the ‘Karma’ tab. Karma is Feedly’s latest experiment that shows you how people react to the content you’re sharing – how many times your peers clicked a link in something you shared, how many times it was re-tweeted and more!

I won’t go into each and every feature of Feedly here, but I highly recommend you check out my post about Feedly and Louis Gray’s terrific Feedly post and start using Feedly A.S.A.P. I just know you’ll love it! Let us know what you think and clue us in on some of your favorite geeky finds in the comments! Thanks!

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There is so much interesting stuff out there, who can keep up?  Some of the best sites that I subscribe to constantly provide really good content and a good read when I can grab a couple of minutes between projects.  Here are six of my favorites:

Webworker Daily www.webworkerdaily.com Useful new gadgets, advices, reviews, ideas and innovations – everything for all of us who connect to the world through the web each day.

Sitepoint www.sitepoint.com Great informative articles, service comparisons, advice and resources for the web.  Plus our very own Geek Gyrl, Alyssa Gregory, is  a regular contributor, I believe. (Thanks, Alyssa.)

Toxel www.toxel.com Not strictly techy, but a great site that reviews design and innovation – often in and around really ordinary objects.  It stimulates the creative juices and constantly reminds me that there is always a new and fresh way to do something.  Besides, darling, there is simply no excuse for every object in your home to be anything less than extraordinary!

Freelanceswitch www.freelanceswitch.com Regular advice and supportive articles on the trials and tribulations of being a freelancer, including handling difficult clients, pricing, presentations, and  time management.  Solid, experienced advice.

Fail blog www.failblog.com – Ok my 13 year old son turned me onto this one, and it doesn’t classify as informative or geeky – its mostly pointing the finger at bad behavior, toilet humor or political incorrectness  – but it is funny, sometimes juvenile and sometimes enlightening.  Badly worded signage, juxpositioned images or simply bad English are posted as “fails”. It usually makes me laugh each day, and we could all use that!

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Well this isn’t a geeky post – but it’s still relevant.   And I’m not just posting a link because I’m featured in the book.    Okay, well, maybe I am!  LOL

Pam Ivey (one of our GeekGyrls) and Kristi Pavlik have just released the new book called The Business of Being Virtual which is now available!

This book brings you insights into some of the best known and successful virtual assistants in the industry.

You can learn more about the book at www.businessofbeingvirtual.com.

Here’s the table of contents:

Congratulations Pam and Kristi!!!

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So, two years ago you ordered a box of 500 business cards, but as a virtual assistant, most of your work is done at home. You don’t have a lot of regular opportunities to hand them out, and you end up needing to update them before you’ve used them all. Of course, you can just recycle them, but first, consider these 15 creative ways to use those old business cards:

1. Use them as bookmarks
2. Leave short notes for family members
3. Create new ones
4. Use them for crafts
5. Build a card castle
6. Fold them in half and use as a money clip
7. Use them to level a wobbly desk
8. Shred them to make confetti
9. Wallpaper your office (maybe a stretch, but still…)
10. Make cubes (this is COOL!)
11. Use them as name labels for books
12. Tape them together to make a drawer liner
13. Use them to clean tiny cervices (like the space next to the oven, in between the keys of your keyboard, around the bathroom sink, in between tiles…you get the idea)
14. Use them to get organized
15. Give some to the kids (trust me, this provides at least 20 minutes of entertainment and gets rid of about 30 cards at a time…more if you have a kid that eats paper.)

What do you do with your old business cards?

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Wordpress is a wonderful platform for not only your blog, but for your business as well. It has  great built-in features that are perfect for marketing and SEO. I love the idea that my website and blog are completely cohesive in style and navigation. The sidebar area is a great place to display content you’ve contributed to other sites. All this leads to some of the best and easiest social marketing strategies you can implement. Plus, it’s all wrapped up in a nice little package you call your business website.

A short time ago I switched my business website from an HTML static site to using the Wordpress platform. Along the way I did a ton of research on working with Wordpress, SEO strategies and tips, Wordpress hacks, and Wordpress plugins etc. If you’re a user of a self-hosted Wordpress blog, you know what it’s like to get plugin fever! I did finally settle on about 21 of them (although there’s one more I have my eye on).

Now that the project is done, I can finally sit back, relax, and enjoy a little “me” time.

Here’s my list of fav Wordpress plugins and why:

1) Akismet – protection from comment spam.
2) Add to Any: Share/Save/Bookmark Button – to help readers spread the word.
3) All in One SEO Pack – for great SEO features for your blog and pages.
4) cforms – for a tremendous variety of forms you can put on your blog site.
5) Comment Reply Notification – so people commenting can be notified on a blog thread they are interested in following.
6) Excerpt Editor 1.2 (not 1.3…that one broke my rss feed when using the auto-generate feature)- to keep the search engines from penalizing you for having duplicate content on the same site.
7) FeedBurner FeedSmith – so I can run my rss feed through Feedburner and get kickin’ stats and promotional features.
8 ) Google XML Sitemaps – to help search engines move about my blog more easily and find all the pages.
9) KB Countdown Widget – a fun widget to create countdowns to anything.
10) NextGEN Gallery – the best photo gallery plugin I’ve ever seen.
11) Redirection – to help redirect readers to other pages outside of my blog site.
12) RSS Footer – to create automated signature, info, and backlinks on the RSS feed page (not to be confused with creating automated signatures on blog posts – that plugin is #21).
13) Simple Tags – love automatically having my tags become my meta keywords.
14) Widget Logic – This was my best find ever! Control what widgets show up on what pages on your site. Most helpful if you’re using Wordpress as your site+blog.
15) WordPress Database Backup – automatically back up my database files.
16) WP-Polls – to put polls on your site for a bit of interaction with readers.
17) Dean’s Permalinks Migration – safely change your permalink structure without breaking the old links to your website, and doesn’t hurt your google pagerank.
18) Google Analytics for WordPress – so you can see how traffic is coming in…and all the other cool stuff that Google Analytics does for you.
19) HeadSpace2 – another great SEO plugin I’ve always wanted to try out.
20) Powerpress by blubrry – to easily integrate video and audio podcasts into my blog sites.
21) Add Sig – to automatically add a signature, keywords, backlinks to every post.

Wow, that’s a lot! It was amazing what I learned when I was moving my website to a Wordpress platform. There are so many great plugins and so many people that have posted info on working with Wordpress. It was quite the learning experience. Thank goodness for free-flowing information.

Andrea Kalli

Popularity: 4% [?]

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Check out MessageSave from TechHit.

I recently ran across this program to archive entire Outlook folders (including attachments) to my client files on my hard drive.  The process was too easy!

Now I’m able to easily archive any client folders over 6 month old and my Outlook program isn’t quite as large any more!  Check out MessageSave from TechHit.

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A few years ago a Virtual Assistant that I know began using a service called ReadNotify.

I signed up for a free account and ReadNotify has simply become one of those tools that I love!

It’s a very affordable service, priced between $24-$36 per year and I’ve found that more than once it has helped when a client may claim to have not received an invoice or an e-mail.

Some of the really cool features of ReadNotify:

• lets you know when your e-mail was been opened
• tracks how long your e-mail was opened or read
• tracks if your e-mail has been forwarded
• notes if your attachments have been opened or web URLs were clicked on

You can sign up for a free account to test the system out.  Once you do, you’ll be hooked.  So what are you waiting for? Sign up for a free account.

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Alexandria Brown is the Ezine Queen.  I’ve been reading Ali’s newsletters for years not only because it’s a fun read but because I learn something new from almost every newsletter that I can apply to my own business to help generate leads or make sales.  Her knowledge is infinite in how to promote your business online via newsletters and marketing.

Boost Business with your Own Ezine is an impressive resource chock full of of information and resources that teaches you step by step how to develop, distribute and market an ezine to build your business, build your subscriber base and market the hell out of your products and services.

Visit Ali’s products page and check out some very cool tools she offers to help you make money online with your business.

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