The Savvy Technologist

Taming wild URLs

I found myself needing to send a very long URL to a group of teachers today and I suspected that not all of their email clients would handle a four-line hyperlink gracefully. So I reached into my bag of tricks and paid a visit to TinyURL.com, a handy little site that takes long URLs and creates shorter ones that are much easier to email. Here’s an example from Google Maps that points to the Hopkins School District main office:

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=1001+highway+7+hopkins+
mn&ll=44.933200,-93.413300&spn=0.067871,0.101722&hl=en

When converted at TinyURL, this rather unwieldy URL becomes:

http://tinyurl.com/8ww26

Isn’t that better? The service works by creating a permanent redirect from the tiny URL to the ugly one. The tiny version is never deleted and can be used over and over again. This site has been around quite a while, but it seems to be fairly unknown. Now you know!

Tags: google