The above screen capture shows how I used the "tinyurl" online utility, to make a second version of this really long blog post URL address:
http://passyworldofict.blogspot.com/2009/07/making-web-pages-at-google-sites.html
as the much shorter alternate address of:
http://tinyurl.com/PwGoogleSites .
It was necessary to do this, because every time that I emailed the original long address link to anyone, the email process split up the link text into separate words. This meant that the link failed when the mail recipient clicked on it.
According to Wikipedia:
The TinyURL homepage at http://tinyurl.com/ has a submission form box that is used to submit a long URL for shortening. For each URL entered, the server adds a new alias in its hashed database and returns a short URL as http://tinyurl.com/xxxxxx in the following page.
If the URL has already been requested, TinyURL will return the existing alias rather than create a duplicate entry. The short URL forwards users to the long URL, without any noticeable time delay.
Short URL aliases are seen as useful because they are easier to write down, remember or pass around, are less error-prone to write, and also fit where space is limited such as IRC channel topics, email signatures, microblogs, certain printed newspapers and magazines, and email clients that impose line breaks on messages at a certain length.
People posting on Twitter make extensive use of shortened URLs to keep their tweets within the service-imposed 140 character limit.
Starting in 2008, TinyURL allowed users to create custom, more meaningful aliases. This means that a user can create descriptive URLs rather than a randomly generated address. For example, http://tinyurl.com/wp-tinyurl.
On the tinyurl homepage, they even supply HTML embed code, that we have modified slightly, so that we can put the tinyurl'er directly onto our web page like this:
So if we have a long URL from one of our blog posts to email to people, it is best to make a tinyurl version to send as well. This means that if the email process breaks up the long link, our contacts can always use the short link. The tinyurl link also looks a lot neater and professional than the big "gangly" blog address.
Enjoy,
Big Passy Wasabi
