Shorten long web addresses into small URLs with TinyURL

Many of the web addresses are quite long and complicated. It is difficult to remember or comprehend them sometimes. Moreover, if you want to pass on a long and complicated web address in some SMS message or in a web service that has character size limit (such as Twitter), it is not possible to do so. Many a time, the size of the long web address itself may be more than the size limit permitted by the web service, even if you forget including some other helpful text with the web address. The answer to this problem is URL shortening services that are available online for free.

Just to illustrate, consider the following URL which has 108 characters:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=941B3470-3AE9-4AEE-8F43-C6BB74CD1466&displaylang=en

Now consider the following URL which has just 25 characters and points to the same web address as above after shortening the above URL:

http://tinyurl.com/y5a879

Or even better, you can just use the following URL which has only 18 characters and it also points to the same web page (this is after removing the “http://” expression):

tinyurl.com/y5a879

You can immediately notice the difference that a shortened URL makes! It is easy to remember and easy to input in an SMS message, etc. Moreover, you won’t have a size limit problem with such shortened URL when using it on a site such as Twitter.

There are several free web services available today which can shorten the web address into a small URL. You then have to just use that small URL to visit that web page and need not type the full web address. TinyURL is one of the most popular URL shortening service. At the last count, there are more than 300 million web pages having shortened URLs from TinyURL. [If you want to learn about bit.ly, another popular URL shortening service, then please visit Shorten your URLs with bit.ly and get also many other features].

To shorten a long web address using TinyURL, you can use any of the following four methods:

• You can go to their website and convert the web address into a small URL.
• An alternative better method is to just drag this TinyURL! bookmarket to the toolbar / bookmark-bar of your browser. Once this bookmarklet is on the toolbar of the browser, you’ll be able to make a TinyURL at the click of a button. By clicking on the toolbar button, a TinyURL will be created for the web page you are currently at. If dragging and dropping of the above bookmarklet is not possible on your browser (it may not be supported in some browsers), you can add the link to your Favorites or Bookmarks in the browser. For example, for adding it to Favorites in Microsoft Internet Explorer, click the link TinyURL! with your right mouse button and select “Add to Favorites…” from the context menu. Click OK if a security warning alert pops-up (this shows up since the link contains javascript). Select the folder in which you want to save it and then click OK.
• Another simple method is to type http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url= in your browser, followed by the web address you want to convert into a small URL. For example, to convert the home-page of Tech Superb website (http://www.techsuperb.com/), type the following address in your browser and you’ll get the small URL made for this web address:

http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url=http://www.techsuperb.com/

• Yet another method is to install this TinyURL Generator add-on to your Mozilla Firefox browser. It will sit as an icon on the status bar of Firefox (see following image) and you can simply click on this icon to convert the web address of the currently open web page in Firefox into a small URL.

TinyURL also offers a preview feature for viewing the details of the shortened URL before actually going to the web address. This may be useful if someone has apprehensions about the shortened URL pointing to some harmful web address. If you want to enable preview of the shortened URL, you simply add “preview.” in the URL. For example, the shortened URL for this Tech Superb site http://tinyurl.com/nyb543 will become http://preview.tinyurl.com/nyb543. If you visit this shortened URL with preview feature, you’ll first get details of the full web address to which it points and only on your confirmation you’ll be taken to that web address. See the following image for this preview:

Some other popular URL shortening services are Bit.ly, urlTea.com, Shorl.com and SnipURL.com.

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