shellebelle
11-06-2008, 10:00 AM
I mentioned in a post about "tiny url"s and someone asked a great question WHAT? LOL
So I thought I would explain. This is just a great product in so many ways.
At the bottom I'll have some extra resources.
TinyURL (tinyurl.com) is a web service created by Kevin Gilbertson that provides short aliases to redirect long URLs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Locator). Gilbertson, a web developer, launched the service in January 2002 because he wanted to be able to link directly to newsgroup postings which frequently had long and cumbersome addresses.
The TinyURL website has a text box to enter a long URL. For each URL entered, the server adds a new alias in its hashed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_table) database and returns a short URL such as https://tinyurl.com/dmsfm . If the URL has already been requested, TinyURL will return the existing alias rather than creating a duplicate entry. The shorter URL is forwarded to the longer one.
Short URL aliases are seen as useful because they're easier to write down, remember or pass around, are less error-prone to write, and also fit where space is limited such as IRC channel topics, email signatures, or microblogs that have a character limit for each post (140 in the case of Twitter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter)). Also some email clients (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_client) impose a maximum length at which they automatically break lines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newline) requiring the user to paste (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut_and_paste) together a long URL rather than just clicking on it. A short URL alias is much less likely to become broken.
Now do be aware to not open nay url sites that you don't trust. That rule still applies but if you see this funky little url this is the why's to it.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/126
So I thought I would explain. This is just a great product in so many ways.
At the bottom I'll have some extra resources.
TinyURL (tinyurl.com) is a web service created by Kevin Gilbertson that provides short aliases to redirect long URLs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Locator). Gilbertson, a web developer, launched the service in January 2002 because he wanted to be able to link directly to newsgroup postings which frequently had long and cumbersome addresses.
The TinyURL website has a text box to enter a long URL. For each URL entered, the server adds a new alias in its hashed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_table) database and returns a short URL such as https://tinyurl.com/dmsfm . If the URL has already been requested, TinyURL will return the existing alias rather than creating a duplicate entry. The shorter URL is forwarded to the longer one.
Short URL aliases are seen as useful because they're easier to write down, remember or pass around, are less error-prone to write, and also fit where space is limited such as IRC channel topics, email signatures, or microblogs that have a character limit for each post (140 in the case of Twitter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter)). Also some email clients (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_client) impose a maximum length at which they automatically break lines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newline) requiring the user to paste (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut_and_paste) together a long URL rather than just clicking on it. A short URL alias is much less likely to become broken.
Now do be aware to not open nay url sites that you don't trust. That rule still applies but if you see this funky little url this is the why's to it.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/126