Sunday, November 9, 2008

Life is Good.

It's no secret to those who see me on a regular basis that I like Life is Good clothing. But that's not what this is about, even though I stole the title and logo for this post. This post is about technical stuff, but technical stuff for everyone. Ever visit a web page (particularly maybe an eBay product page) and want to email a link to the page you're on to someone? You can drag and drop or cut and paste the URL directly into an email, but you end up with a really ugly long mess sometimes.

There are several sites that reduce URLs for you, but my favorite is http://is.gd (and it's easy to remember once you know the creators think of it as "is good"). You copy the URL you want to send to your clipboard, visit http://is.gd, and paste it in the box. You'll have a new tiny URL returned to your clipboard. Paste that URL in your email and when someone clicks it, they'll get your intended page. Seem like a pain? Well, it is a little. So if you use Firefox, streamline it the process using this plugin. Now when you're in Firefox viewing a page you want to make a shorter link to, you just click the "is" button to the left of the URL in the top of your window. You'll have a new shorter URL put in your clipboard automatically that you can just "paste" into your email (or whatever).

Very handy.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

One thing that should be mentioned is that there is a high level of trust involved here. Following one of these URLs could lead someone to a website that is phishing for their personal information, monitoring their viewing habits, or worse. There are a few recommendations I would make to folks (each with an increasing level of paranoia):
1) Only follow these URLs if they are from someone that you know.
2) Look at the page you end up at carefully.
3) Don't input any information at the site.
4) Close the tab or window you used to view web page.
Not trying to scare anyone, just inform.

Donnie Barnes said...

Troy is right...only trust shortened URLs from people you know well.

Lis said...

What would we do without Troy, our very own internet FBI agent? :)

Hilary Stokes said...

This is very cool. Thanks for the tip!