How To: Shorten URL for emailing links
With the rise of Javascript and other web based programing languages, links to certain webpages have grown downright unwieldy. Places like eBay, Amazon, and many online shopping programs are the worst cases. But these portals provide such a vast number of items that any flat file based system from the 90’s would require a team of people to update it 24 hours a day as prices change and stock comes and goes.
Enter a plethora of web sites that “shorten” a given URL and present it in a friendlier format.
Tinyurl is one of the oldest and most popular of such services. They even provide a link that can be dragged to the browser tool bar for on the fly URL shortening services.
Becomes: http://tinyurl.com/5gvb4j
Minilink.org does the same thing, and even has a tools page that has a tool bar Javascript link just like Tinyurl. This site has one huge advantage over TinyURL though. Their links include the server name to keep people from inadvertently visiting the seedy parts of the Internet.
Thus the above link becomes: http://lnk.nu/amazon.com/n4m.html
While not every URL needs to be shortened, there are plenty that do. These two tools will certainly help in cases when it is needed. Email, IM’s, forum postings, etc would all benefit.