Short Tiny Small Urls and Links
June 20th, 2005If you have a very long url and want to quote your link somewhere or add your link to the limited signature on forums, what do you do?
Why make urls tiny, small or short?
1. Hide the original url. This makes it possible to mask affiliate links or the main url for whatever reason.
2. Get a neat short url, easy to remember and quote.
3. Make a smaller URL that will work for any page on your site.
4. Long urls tend to break into parts, or distort pages in forums and blog comments. Small urls fix this.
5. Some forms like signatures in forums allow limited characters, so a tiny url would fit there.
So the answer is small urls free services like Tinyurl. The best way is to drag a bookmarklet to the browser toolbar and whenever you want to create a short url, just click it and get the tinyurl (or use their form). And quote this anywhere to reach that page. Simple and fast.
Shorl.com is another such service, it gives a direct url to the statistics in addition to the ’shorlify’ url which is password protected.
Snipurl has some more advanced features if you like going beyond the simple short url. It allows you to create the unique short name which follows if you do not like the random text they generate. You can also create password protected urls for privacy purposes. You can edit them, track them and even make multiple snipurls in one powerful go.
This is one of my popular posts which I quote often with a long url.
http://pchere.blogspot.com/2005/02/absolutely-delicious-complete-tool.html
See what TinyUrl created
http://tinyurl.com/65a3bAnd this is what Shorl created
http://shorl.com/jestatadylaseSnipUrl got me this
http://snipurl.com/dojt
Possibly there are more which you know of!
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I use TinyURL all the time…if you use Firefox (or Mozilla Suite), you *must* install the “TinyURL Creator” extension:
http://tinyurl.com/33t9h
This extension adds a context menu (right-click) item to create a TinyURL for the page you’re visiting. You can also hover over a link, and create a TinyURL for that link. Either way, it puts the resulting TinyURL on the clipboard, ready to paste wherever you need it (like this comment…)
Works anywhere Firefox/Mozilla is supported (I’ve used it on OSX and WinXP.)
Try notlong.com. You can give some meaning to the URL.
Don’t forget other similarly useful services like http://www.tinypic.com and http://www.imageshack.us/. I use them very often.
You might also want to try http://doiop.com
I use notlong.com since it has the my most useful options.
Oh, how I hate tinyurl. Those of us that pay attention to the urls of where we’re going are driven crazy by tinyurl and similar services. Unless it’s a very very long URL and you can’t make a proper link, or you know it’s going to be written down — use A HREF, people!
For the perfect example of terrible tinyurl usage, see tony’s post above.
I use lilurl.us you can customize your link name there too.
There’s also makeashorterlink.com.
I like snipurl.com as mentioned in the article…mostly because you can customize it rather than be assigned a random sequence or letters/numbers. More memorable.
Plus you have the choice of using the SNIPURL version:
(using the example for the page above)
http://snipurl.com/dojt
or
you can shorten it even more with the SNURL version:
http://snurl.com/dojt
Both versions of the addys work.
I like makeashorterlink.com. While they have the disadvantage of a somewhat longer domain name, I prefer their approach to their URLs: a) URLs are persistent; a given shortening will remain so long as they run the site, and b) they interpose a page showing you where the link ultimately goes, so you can change your mind before, say, goatse ends up on your screen at work (the interposed page can be removed by setting a cookie).
I very recently made a bookmarklet for shurl.org I call ShurlThis! It makes it easy to make customized short URLs in one click using either highlighted text on a page or text entered into a prompt box. I hope others find it as useful as I do.
I never click on short/tiny URLs because I don’t know where they lead. They are a big security risk to the user. Perhaps the bad guys haven’t noticed this yet, but it’s only a matter of time.
An the shortest result is from http://yatuc.com : http://yatuc.com/8o
I use qurl.com because it integrates with my del.icio.us bookmarks and I can set it to preview where I’m going before I’m sent there – which kind of addresses Rob’s concerns about security.
Check out http://traceurl.com
There you can choose the prefix of the generated URL. Thus the short URLs don’t look that cryptic. On top of that you can monitor accesses to the URL, meaning count accesses and see where the visitors come from.
Hurl it is very small.
http://hurl.it/
http://hurl.it/x
With URLHawk (http://urlhawk.com) you can track, optionally protect and customise your URL. Also has clocking functions.
Generally I can make my URLs 4-5 letters shorter than TinyURL and have it meaningful.
Shlnk.com generate shorter URLs as well. And it has a preview function too.
Hi,
I use http://tubeurl.com it have a nice and fast look, The firefox plug-in is very nice
Hi, nice list.
There is easy one: http://tubeurl.com – i recommend.
I found that http://www.redirectrevealer.com can unmask these urls and return the final destination url so you see exactly where you are going before you click the link.
Try INTURL, it’s redirect faster, no spam.
http://inturl.com
PLq62n re re re
GAV GAV
Have difficulties with never-ending URLs? Diggurl will solve all your problems.
Visit http://www.diggurl.com to create shortened/redirected URLs to any long URL.
# Free! No registration required.
# Manage your shortened URLs.
# Set temporary download links and protect them with password.
# Hide your URLs from search engines and bots.
# Cleaner bookmarks in your web browsers.
# Continuous URLs in emails.
# AJAX interface;
# Bulk URL shortening;
# Password-protected URLs;
# Temporary URLs;
# Custom tags;
# Custom tags for bulk URLs (automatically assigned tags like tag1, tag2, tag3 and so on);
# Redirects statistic – referer domain, referer page, visitor’s IP (+ link to geographical information about each visitor), date;
# URLs and hits statistics can be seen even without registration (IP-based authorization);
# Registered users: edit/delete URLs;
# Mass upload URLs from file;
# Export links to CSV file;