Do you send links to web pages in emails? Are you surprised at the length of some web page addresses? If so, you can use TinyURL to create shorter web page addresses. The technical term for a web page address is URL (Uniform Resource Locator). I’ll use this term throughout the remainder of this article. TinyURL is a free service that lets you enter a long URL and get a shorter URL that you can use in its place.
For example, the following URL (web page address) should take you to a Amazon web page for a Netgear ethernet switch.
TinyURL shortened this URL from 131 characters to 26.
Using TinyURL is easy.
- Go to the TinyURL web site and paste a long URL in the field labeled, “Enter a long URL to make tiny”.
- Then click the button named “Make TinyURL”.
- A moment later you’ll see the shorter URL listed on the screen. Copy this shorter URL and then paste it into an email or any place else that you’d like to use it.
Tip – When you put a URL into an email message, I always recommend putting angle brackets at the beginning and end. For example, here I’ve put angled brackets around a URL for Apple’s web site: <http://www.apple.com> Using these brackets will eliminate problems at line breaks. To elaborate, if you put a long URL in an email, there is a chance that the URL might be split onto two different lines. Many email applications get confused if this happens and won’t see the part of the URL that appears on the second line. Putting brackets around the URL helps the email application to find the entire URL. Tidbits has an article that gives a bit more detail about this topic if you’re interested.