salimma's Journal: TinyURL rediscovered

Are you sick of posting URLs in emails only to have it break when sent causing the recipient to have to cut and paste it back together? Then you've come to the right place. By entering in a URL in the text field below, we will create a tiny URL that will not break in email postings and never expires.

TinyURL.com is a really nice, free, Internet service, especially for people like me who posts to mailing lists where HTML mail is frowned upon. Basically it provides a free Internet redirection service, and if you have ever had a link being broken because it was too long and became split inadvertently when the e-mail is forwarded, you could use TinyURL.

Discovered it last summer, promptly lost the link to it and could not recall the name, and after fruitless Google searches - try free redirection service and see for yourself - stumbled into it being used by Bruce Schneier in his excellent Crypto-Gram security newsletter. Thanks Bruce!

Having thus found it in a security newsletter, it just occurs to me that there is no way to tell a 'good' TinyURL link from a 'bad' one. And with spoofed e-mails and hijacked e-mail lists one could not even trust e-mails from known trusted addresses... no evading reading something carefully before impulsively clicking links, really. And oh, don't use the Outlook+Internet Explorer combination :)

 

TinyURL composition and ettiqutte

[turg]

I especially like the bookmarklet -- plus the fact that (in IE), the tiny url is automatically put in the clipboard. So all I have to do to make a tiny url is press the button on my links bar and that'll make a tiny for the current page and put it on the clipboard.

People have complained about the opacity of tiny urls in several mailing lists and newsgroups I read. The good ettiqutte, I think, is to include both the long url (and let it get wrapped) and the short one, so people can still make whatever judge

TinyURLs = ***ANNOYING***

[johndiii]

If I can't see where I'm going, I will often just not bother to click the link. And I never follow a tinyurl from Slashdot. :-) I don't know if I've been to the link before, nor do I have any context. And, as a list moderator, I don't trust these services to still be around when someone goes to the archives.

I use a tool called UrlRun [sellsbrothers.com]. It takes whatever is on the (Windows) clipboard, cleans it up (pulls out line breaks, spaces, and '>'), and opens it in a new browser window.