TinyURL

Here’s a web service I’ve always valued: TinyURL.com.

Have you ever wanted to send a web link to somebody and discovered that it has a long and unwieldy URL like this one?

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=trinity+college+cambridge
&ie=UTF8&ll=52.204329,0.115727&spn=0.003925,0.007972&t=k&om=1

It really messes up your email formatting, some email programs fragment it so it isn’t clickable, and it’s impossible to dictate to somebody over the phone or to send in a text message.

If you hop over to TinyURL.com, though, you can just paste it in and get back something like this:

http://tinyurl.com/nmcsk

which does the same thing and is much easier to hand around.

There are other services like this, but TinyURL has been around for a long time and seems to do a good, efficient and quick job.

Enjoyed this post? Why not sign up to receive Status-Q in your inbox?

4 Comments

There is also a nifty firefox extension for it ,tinyurl creator at https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/126/

Cool! Thanks, Geoff.

After installing it, you can right-click on the page and create a TinyURL which is then put on your clipboard.

Very nice.

Why go to the trouble of installing a Firefox only extension when TinyUrl provide a cross-browser Javascript snippet to put under a button on the toolbar?

It is a neat service.

here is an alternative http://www.AtomURL.com that uses web 2.0 tech

Got Something To Say:

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

To create code blocks or other preformatted text, indent by four spaces:

    This will be displayed in a monospaced font. The first four 
    spaces will be stripped off, but all other whitespace
    will be preserved.
    
    Markdown is turned off in code blocks:
     [This is not a link](http://example.com)

To create not a block, but an inline code span, use backticks:

Here is some inline `code`.

For more help see http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax

*

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser