Create Short Tiny Small Urls and Links
If you have a very long url and want to quote a short link somewhere or add your link to the limited signature on forums, what do you do? Make a short url.
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.htmlSee 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!
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).