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Shrinking URLs

Page history last edited by Doug Peterson 15 years, 8 months ago

Check out the following URL:

 

http://www.clintonnewsrecord.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=1117050

 

It's a long URL that will take you to a particular story in the Clinton News Record newspaper.  The story actually deals with the appearance of Crop Circles outside of Clinton in Holmesville Ontario.  If you want to see the story, carefully type the address into the URL bar in your browser, and press go.  Provided you didn't make a mistake, you should have the item in your browser shortly.

 

There are better ways to get to that link.  The more sophisticated might highlight the entire address, copy it, and then paste it into the URL bar.  That works.  It does require that you, the end user, do the work.

 

But, the web page author can help out to make it easier. 

 

For example, you could make it a link.

 

http://www.clintonnewsrecord.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=1117050

 

Now, all that your visitors have to do is click on the link and you'll be routed there.  This is far more convenient for visitors.  They just click and are sent to the website.  Believe it or not, there can still be problems.

 

Suppose you were to send the link to a friend via email or SMS.  Some email programs and services may truncate or break apart long addresses.  This is done to ensure accurate delivery of email but may accidentally make the address unusable by breaking it.

 

There are web services that will take the long URL above and shrink it for you.

 

A favourite of mine is http://moourl.com/

 

How does it work? 

 

Simply, actually.  Just type the long URL (or better paste it into place for accuracy) into the text entry box and press Moo!

 

 

Give it a second and the URL is shorted for you!

 

 

Notice the "New URL"?  Just send that to your friends and it's considerably shorter with less chance for error. 

 

There are a number of web resources that do this for you.  However, there's one feature of MooURL that makes it stand out.  While the URL is shorter, the "eb32q" part is random and not necessarliy intuitive.  If making sense is important to you, then let's "Give your moourl a personal touch".

 

I want to give this address a little personalization.  So, I want to include the reference to crop circles in it.  Follow the link and I'll type in "circles"

 

 

 

And the deed is done!

 

 

Send the link "http://moourl.com/circles" to your friends and they'll end up at the webpage you want.

 

How does it work? 

 

It's just a re-direction service.  When they follow the link, it takes them to the MooURL site which decodes the string and sends them to your original site.  It's fast, slick, let's you personalize things and helps to make sure that people end up where you want them. 

 

As more and more websites become database driven, URLs get longer and longer.  Be a good friend - shorten the URLs so that people get where you want them to go.

 

Other Similar Sites:

 

MooURL isn't the only website to short URLs.  You can check out:

 

http://notlong.com/

http://tinyurl.com/

http://metamark.net/

http://urlsnub.com/

http://www.ptpurl.com/

 

Or, if you're a contrarian, make your links very user unfriendly here!

 

http://hugeurl.com/

 

 

 

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