Monday, September 14, 2015

Size Matters

It's true. Shorter is better.

Ask anyone and they'll tell you they'd much rather type this:

      http://bit.ly/1Lp3elg

rather than this:

      http://montylatiolais.blogspot.com/2015/09/updating-your-twitter-username.html

Using Twitter? No way do you want to waste your allotment of characters on some big honkin' URL. Enter the shortened URL. It's basically a proxy or index that points to the full or complete URL. There are various options available.

Here are my three favs...

First up, bitly (https://bitly.com/) I probably use this one more than any other strictly out of habit.
So easy, as with all these services, you simply paste in your full URL and Bingo!  Out pops your very own shortened URL.



Next up is tiny url (http://tinyurl.com/) Same song, second verse.



Lastly is goo.gl (https://goo.gl/) ...by now you know the drill.



Now if you look closely at the examples above you see the url contains either "bit.ly", "tinyurl.com", or "goo.gl". If you prefer your short URLs to be branded, you can purchase a short URL domain. (Note: These domains can only be used with shortened URLs.) For example, if I wanted, my short URLs could read something like.

     http://monty.me/1Lp3elg

More information can be found here.

So, if there are no further questions, we now return you to your regularly scheduled program, already in progress.



...our journey continues






1 comment:

Maxime Tremblay said...

Hello Monty
Did you know that Twitter does this automatically?
Have a look here : https://support.twitter.com/articles/78124

From the above :
All links (URLs) posted in Tweets are shortened using our t.co service. When viewing the Tweet on twitter.com the original URL (or shortened version of the original URL) will be displayed.

A URL of any length will be altered to 23 characters, even if the link itself is less than 23 characters long.