Recently, I’ve been asked how I’ve shortened some of the URL’s that appear in this discussion, so that they don’t go on for lines. In other words, how do I make them short and succinct, so that they are easy to share. In a word – easily (and free)!!! This is particularily important for some of the social media sites, and of course, Twitter.
There are two services – www.tinyurl.com and www.bit.ly (and I’m sure that there are others). Just enter the url on their site, and voila! A short, succinct URL.
I grabbed a random news piece (something from the UK Telegraph newspaper on the Iraq elections). This is the ‘raw’ URL which is quite unwieldy:
Entered into www.bit.ly, it becomes: http://bit.ly/b4yaS3
Entered into www.tinyurl.com it becomes: http://tinyurl.com/ygs5uns
TinyURL also allows you to custom alias your links (so that they become more ‘English’ and less ‘Computereze’). So, I also created this at TinyURL: http://tinyurl.com/telegraph-iraq
You can click on any of the four links (the original long one, and the three shorter ones), and get to the same article.
Happy URL sharing!!! No longer will your friends have to cut and paste a URL which is longer than a line to get a ‘real’ URL they can click.
