Cheryl LaGuardia

Better Late Than Never? TinyURL

As you have probably figured out by now (if you’ve read more than one of my posts), I get lots of referrals to products, sites, etc. from colleagues. Some are about new and interesting items, some are about sites and services I’m never going to go to and am not going to blog about, and some are more… “vintage” sites that others have known about for some time (read “weeks” in web speak) but that are new to me.

TinyURL is one of these last. I called my local web guru to ask about euphemizing a URL link for space’ sake, and he told me (in his usual, unfailingly upbeat, can-do manner) I needed to go to tinyurl.com, where you can turn a long URL into – that’s right – a tiny URL. So I tried it, and yep, it turned my lengthy URL into a much tidier, small one – which, unfortunately, didn’t work (I’m assuming this was because my URL was using a proxy server for authentication).

But the site piqued my curiosity, so of course I went to Encyclopaedia Britannica Online and Wikipedia to see what they had on it, and found Wikipedia’s entry for TinyURL (nothing in EB Online). I was saddened to see that this highly useful service has apparently been abused and can create potential problems (read on in the article), but then I was intrigued by “TinyURL-whacking,” described thus by Wikipedia: “Random letters and numbers can be placed after the first forward-slash in an attempt to hit interesting sites without knowing in advance what they will be.”  

So TinyURL may, or may not, come in handy for you one day. Will I use it? I can imagine circumstances when it will be helpful, so I’m storing the info away (along with the usual disclaimers) for future reference.

More as it happens,

Cheryl

Posted by Cheryl LaGuardia on July 23, 2007 | Comments (10)