Playing with Tiny URL’s    

Sometimes when I’m supposed to be working, I’m not. As part of my goof off time, I ended up on the other side of the internet. I can’t say how I got there, but I ended up at TinyUrl.com.

If you have twittered or tweeted, you’re familiar with tiny URLs. Since Twitterers can only insert a maximum of 140 characters per tweet, long web addresses have to be condensed into a tiny URL.

Dawned on Me

Sometimes things are so obvious, that I’m almost embarrassed to share this with you. It’s so simple to make a tiny URL out of any long web address. All you have to do is go to TinyUrl.com and paste the long web address in the appropriate text box and click “Make TinyURL!” and that’s it.

The website does the rest. You’ll get two URL’s. One is the actual tiny URL and the other is a tiny URL preview (which requires cookies to be enabled in order to preview).

You can even create your own custom alias for your tiny URL. For example, I created a custom tiny URL for my last blog post. The actual long and drawn out URL is: http://www.nojobformom.com/2009/08/27/end-of-summer-writing-goals/. The new and improved customized tiny URL is: http://tinyurl.com/FeliciaBlog .

Only Get One Chance

Once you create a tiny URL for a web page you cannot change it. After thinking about the customized URL I created, I realized that it didn’t adequately describe the post, so I tried to change it to something like http://tinyurl.com/Summer-is-Over, but it politely reminded me that I already created an alias for that post. Oh well, I’ll put more thought into my conversions on the next go ‘round.

Bookmarked for Future Use

I found it so useful that I dragged the link and dropped it to my Firefox toolbar. It sure can come in handy when attempting to share long web addresses in limited spaces. If you haven’t tried it as yet, give it a whirl.

P.S. It’s also great for masking affiliate links.