What if you wanted to publish something; say, a gallery of images, a ‘for sale’ sign, a community service announcement, a poll, an electoral or political appeal, etc., or any message that is temporary or transient in nature, and you didn’t to publish it on your blog (because you don’t have one or because it is off topic or because you don’t want to), didn’t want to keep it relegated to Facebook,
and wanted to be able to share it on Twitter, Pinterest, or any of the numerous other social bookmarking and sharing services.
What to do? Use CheckThis, a free, online service which lets you create temporary public or private ‘disposable’ messages on demand, including a comments section and embedded videos, Paypal payment widgets, maps, images, even custom polls and other elements.
For an example/demo page that I created: click here.
‘Apps’: are the best thing about CheckThis, by which is meant the ability to add a Google Map, add and customize a poll, embed a video, add a Paypal payment function, add images, a tweet, links, etc., and the reason CheckThis is preferrable to similar services previously mentioned such as ShortText. The screenshot above, middle, depicts ‘apps’ being added to the page.
Registration: anyone can use the service without registration; however, if you do register you can take advantage of certain functions/services, such as emails that tell you that your link is about to expire, etc.
Link expiry: links can ‘live’ for a day, a week, or a month. Your choice. Unfortunately, you can’t get more specific than that, and your link apparently cannot be maintained indefinitely.
Hosting and URL: your page will have a Checkit.com domain and, if you uploaded images from your computer, these will be hosted on their domain as well.
The verdict: temporary, democratic publishing done right and (as of yet) ad-free. As stated, the fact that you can add such advanced elements as Paypal payment functionality, polls, embedded videos and sound, etc. makes this one a cut above other similar services that I have seen. I only wish that it were possible to extend the life of the message beyond one month, or even publish a link indefinitely.
[Thanks to user Panzer for the tip about this service]
Try CheckThis.