Peace of Mind Organizing

Tiny time-saving tech tip

7 July 2010

How’s that for alliteration?

If you’re on Twitter, you know the importance of URL shorteners. They’re websites that take a long website address (URL) and shorten them. In Twitter they’re important because messages are limited to 140 characters. But they’re also handy in emails, because sometimes long URLs take up more than one line, rendering them unclickable in some email programs.

There are lots of URL shorteners. The one most familiar is probably tinyurl.com.

I picked up a tip that’s saved me lots of time that I want to share today. My favorite URL shortener is bit.ly and here’s why. If I’m at a website I want to share, let’s say it’s my July 1 post on this blog:

http://www.peaceofmindorganizing.com/blog/great-resources-for-those-with-lifelong-disorganization

and I want to shorten it, all I have to do is put the letters “bit.ly/” in front of the address in the URL window. Like this:

bit.ly/http://www.peaceofmindorganizing.com/blog/great-resources-for-those-with-lifelong-disorganization

When I hit enter, I’m automatically taken to bit.ly’s website and a shortened URL is displayed. In this case, it’s

http://bit.ly/cIHDSy

One click to copy it and I’m done!

I suppose it’s possible that other URL shorteners do this, but I’ve been so satisfied with bit.ly that I haven’t tried. (And bit.ly itself is five characters shorter than tinyurl.com)

Tagged with: technology

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