Thursday 16 August 2007

Tinyurl. Life's too short to bother messing about with huge web addresses.

Here's a most useful something I found long ago, and kind of assumed everybody knew about it. Now of course I know they don't.

Ever wanted to send someone a link/web-address, And found it composed of an unmanageable scramble of characters, impossible to memorise, and several lines long?
That link, or address is called a URL, Or 'Uniform Resource Locator', in the language of the internet
the web depends on accurate addresses to locate the many millions of items on the vast number of computers, yours and mine included, maybe, and bring you the one you want.
Here is one to one of my posts....http://gritinthegears.blogspot.com/2007/08/from-summer-with-monika-roger-mcgough.html
Unwieldy isn't it?...
But easy compared to:-

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Rievaulx+Abbey,+Rievaulx,
+York,+North+Yorkshire+YO62,+United+Kingdom&ie=UTF8&cd=1&sll=37.0625,
-95.677068&sspn=27.504711,59.765625&ll=54.260361,-1.116872&spn=0.009876,0.029182&t
=k&z=15&iwloc=addr&om=1

Help is at hand in the form of TinyURL. Just for you, I've added a widget in my sidebar. Paste that mess into it and... Click on 'Make tinyurl', hey presto, the mess becomes:- http://tinyurl.com/2k6r8n

The 248 characters of the original are trimmed to just 25, yet they still get to the same page.
(Actually they don't, because I had to snip the original to fold it into this text space, urls don't like to be snipped)

On tiny's homepage you can find a widget to drag to your toolbar, which I find a boon. Especially when I want to leave a link in a comment, because I just can't ever be bothered to mess around
with HTML, which I hate with a passion.

That's it.
If you found it helpful, do please let me know.

1 comment:

  1. I did, I do, I will. I have found that some things do not accept a huge url, being to big for the box you wish to squish it into. This makes sense to me - tiny urls!

    ReplyDelete


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