tinyurl « WordPress.com Tag Feed

TinyURL Bookmark Trick

Jonathan Parsons — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 22:59:42 +0000

You don't have to go to TinyURL.com to use their service. Simply add a favorite/bookmark to your toolbar with the Java code below as the address and you can easily click one button and have a TinyURL generated for the page that you are viewing.

javascript:void(location.href='http://tinyurl.com/create.php?url='+location.href)

TinyURL

Jonathan Parsons — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 22:32:54 +0000

Here is a solution for those URLs (website addresses) that go on forever. Often the links get broken in an email if they are too long, and can also be difficult to type or read over the telephone. At TinyURL.com, you create a much shorter URL for free. Just go to their site and paste the log URL and wha-la... a short version. You can even create custom URLs instead of the automatically generated ones.

The problem with tinyURL

dcblogger — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 16:24:23 +0000

Lambert

Oh, and tiny URLs are evil, for two reasons I keep meaning to post on: (1) Ideally, a URL should be self-documenting (like ours) for the sake of the reader; but more importantly (2) the Internet scales because there is no central authority through which URLs must pass in order to be decoded. However, tinyURLs are such an authority, so they break the architecture. This “service” should not be encouraged.

On the other hand, what are you going to do if you want to email a link and the fool developers designed a 300 character URL?

Code snippet: tinyurl link creation api

Mike Luby — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 16:34:14 +0000

Here is a quick code snippet to use the tinyurl link creation api.

[sourcecode language='php']< ?php
//tinyURL function, needs url to be passed to tinyrul
function tinyURL( $url ) {
//Initializes a new session and return a cURL handle
$curl = curl_init( );
//Sets an option on the given cURL session handle.
//request url
curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_URL, "http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url=" . urlencode( $url ) );
curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1 ); //return transfer
curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 10 ); // connection timeout
//Execute the given cURL session.
$tiny = curl_exec( $curl );
//Closes a cURL session and frees all resources. The cURL handle, $curl , is also deleted.
curl_close( $curl );
//return result from curl
return( $tiny );
}

echo tinyURL( "http://strategicv.com/" ); //echos: http://tinyurl.com/3r4j8c
?>[/sourcecode]

What makes one short URL better than another

Scott — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 00:17:48 +0000

If the goal of URL shorteners is to make a URL as short as possible, that would mean that is.gd is whopping 60% better than TinyURL.com.

Personally, I use Bit.ly because of the neato bookmarklet (it is also has a short name), but other shorteners offer different features like previewing, email cloaking, etc. You can check out over 90 different services here.

A Character Length Comparison Of Various URL Shortening Services

Bram Pitoyo — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 03:36:16 +0000

When you want to utilize every bit of that 140-character Tweet limit to communicate your latest find or endeavor, every character matters. So I thought I’d compile a character count of most URL shortening services out there and give you a round, hard number of just how short did the developer mean when he said “short”?

Feel like I’m missing something, or have a service to add to the list? Leave a comment, Tweet, or Email me.

The list will be ordered in ascending order, from the lowest to highest count, and will be presented in this format:

(Service name)
(Snarky commentary, whenever appropriate)
(Shortened URL format)
(Character Count)

Here we go.

tr.im
The Serious Contender
http://tr.im/XX
15
(Admittedly, not going to stay this way for very long)

is.gd
The Tried-And-True
http://is.gd/XXXX
17

Shrinkify
http://s7y.us/XXX
17

HURL
http://hurl.ws/XXX
18

Jmp2.net
http://jmp2.net/XX
18

2BIG
http://2big.at/XXX
18

twurl
The Fine Local Product
http://twurl.cc/XXX
19

Metamark
http://xrl.us/XXXXX
19

Tiny.pl
http://tiny.pl/XXXX
19

The Make-Up-Your-Own-Keyword
bit.ly
http://bit.ly/XXXXXX
20

POPrl
http://poprl.com/XXX
20

QurlyQ
http://qurlyq.com/XX
20

PiURL
http://piurl.com/XXX
20

Tnij.org
http://tnij.org/XXXX
20

FON Get Simple
http://fon.gs/XXXXXX
20

Bloat.me
http://bloat.me/XXXX
20

abbrr
http://abbrr.com/XXXX
21

Knol Me
http://knol.me/XXXXXX
21

Snipurl / Snurl / Snipr
http://snurl.com/XXXXX
22

The Twitter-Tracker Tweetburner
http://twurl.nl/XXXXXX
22

moourl
http://moourl.com/XXXXX
23

RubyURL
http://rubyurl.com/XXXX
23

Urlenco.de
http://urlenco.de/XXXXX
23

TinyURL
The Granddaddy
http://tinyurl.com/XXXXXX
25

dwarfurl
http://dwarfurl.com/XXXXXX
26

kissa.be - bişeyler kısaltma servisi

Tanju Yıldız — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 20:12:30 +0000

Ne zamandır paylaşmak istiyordum kissa.be servisini. Kısaca anlatmam gerekirse, kissa.be Türk yapımı basit bir TinyURL servisi. Ama ondan fazlaca ayıran özellikleri de yok değil hani. Bu servis aynı zamanda metin, e-posta ve görsel kısaltma özelliği de var. Üstelik kissa.be servisi tamamen gelişime açık ve sitesinden kaynak kodlarını paylaşıyor. Ben bu servisi çok beğendim. Türk yapımı olması beni heyecanlandırdı. Bu servisi kullanalım, kullandırttıralım. Desteğimizi onu kullanarak gösterelim. Herkese iyi çalışmalar.

URL Shorteners - Kp it Shrt

Chittaranjan — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 19:00:28 +0000

Long URL's are a PITA! Imagine sharing a URL that has a few ampersands [&], few equal tos [=], few question marks [?] and a whole lot of slashes [/] over the email or over IM. Tedious, isn't it? Agreed, a simple copy-paste would do the job but won't it look messy? It would look gaudy if the url is really long and is broken into two lines, in emails and even on webpages. Again, we can use hyperlinked text in emails and on webpages but with other services like IMs and Twitter, where there is a character limit for messages, long URLs are a bane.

Enter a plethora of URL Shortening sites....websites wherein you submit the long URL and it returns a smaller, compact URL. Of course, clicking on the new one will lead to the original one :P The oldest one such site that I can remember is Snipurl (which nowadays has three mirrors) which used to appear frequently in Digit Magazine's articles. TinyURL is another popular one, if not the popular one [Wikipedia entry]. Another one that I've started using recently is Is.gd which might arguably be the shortest URL for a URL shortening site :mrgreen:

Some of the URL shortening sites that I've come across/used include:

and I think there are many other such sites. [Update: In fact, Mashable chronicles 90+ such URL shorteners over here] And these have their own pros and cons. For example, with TinyURL, you can show the original URL to the clickers before they actually go there so that they aren't scammed into clicking and going someplace they don't want to! On Snipurl, one can login and manage their url's. And many of them have the provision of adding a custom nick to the url i.e. instead of a randomly generated http://snipurl/3qua4, I can create a nick like http://snipurl/ycblog :)

Cons include the ubiquitous security issues. Such url's are opaque i.e. the clicker won't have any inkling of where the url leads to. This is to an extent remediated by the preview feature available with most sites. Another drawback is spamming. Say spam url's with known words are blocked by an email agent or a firewall. Using these shortened url's, they can bypass these filtering methods. Some sites allow email id's to be shortened/masked; in case the site isn't as trustworthy as it seemed to be, we'd regret submitting our email id to it!

All of these sites have disclaimers and privacy policies. I urge you to go through them once before starting to use their services. Better to be safe than sorry! Don't say I didn't warn you. And just in case you need to share this post with your friends, the URL is http://is.gd/2IzC :cool:

Bookmarklets, Twitter, TinyURL, and bit.ly - Lessons Learned

jimbreen — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 19:57:41 +0000

When I first started playing with Twitter, I wanted to be able to easily post the link of any page I was reading in a tweet. That was easy enough when browsing on my computer, but the lack of cut and paste on my iPhone seemed to make it impossible to share pages found while browsing the internet in my pocket.

Then I remembered that bookmarklets can be used to add a lot of functionality to the iPhone. Surely, I thought, someone has written a bookmarklet to shorten a URL and post it to Twitter. And I was right, but nothing I found was exactly what I was looking for.

TwitThis is dependant on the third party TwitThis.com and requires entering your Twitter name and password into that site. Non-starter.
A post at myopiclunacy was promising, but turned out to require setting up a PHP page on a server. I was looking for a 100% browser solution.
The URL shortening services such as TinyURL, bit.ly, and is.gd all provide stock bookmarklets, but those don't address the Twitter posting.

C'mon, I thought, I'm not the first guy wanting to Twitter from an iPhone. Why has no one written a simple bookmarklet that calls the shortening service API for the current URL and then redirects the user to Twitter populating the status textbox with the shortened URL?

As usual, the internet is smarter than me, and there are a few reasons why my dream bookmarklet doesn't exist.

Twitter Shortens URLs Automatically

As you may have been screaming at me to this point, Twitter already does URL shortening. Just include your long URL in your tweet, and if it's longer than a certain number of characters, Twitter calls TinyURL behind the scenes and includes the shortened URL in the tweet that everyone sees. Knowing that, you can just populate the full URL of the current page to the Twitter status textbox with the following bookmarklet:

javascript:void(location.href='http://twitter.com/home?status='+location.href)

To try it, just create a new browser bookmark and copy the above line as the bookmark location. And with that bookmark synced to my iPhone, I can easily post a tweet linking to the great site I'm on right now.

However, this solution is not perfect:

TinyURL is the only option. If you are preferential to bit.ly or is.gd, too bad.
When you visit twitter from an iPhone (and likely any mobile browser), you get redirected to Twitter's mobile site. The status text box on the mobile site only allows 140 characters of input. So if your URL is 80 characters, you only have 60 characters left for the rest of your tweet despite the fact that the URL will eventually be shortened. And URLs can get a lot longer than 80 characters.
It can be ungainly to type the rest of your twitter post into the mobile site when the input box is already populated with a long URL, especially if you were hoping to add text both before and after the URL.

Bookmarklets Can't Do That

If no one else was going to write the obvious URL-shortening Twitter bookmarklet, I guessed it was up to me. I came up with the following, formatted for readability:

javascript:(function(){
var xmlhttp=false;
/*@cc_on @*/
/*@if (@_jscript_version >= 5)
// JScript gives us Conditional compilation, we can cope with old IE versions.
// and security blocked creation of the objects.
 try {
  xmlhttp = new ActiveXObject("Msxml2.XMLHTTP");
 } catch (e) {
  try {
   xmlhttp = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
  } catch (E) {
   xmlhttp = false;
  }
 }
@end @*/
if (!xmlhttp && typeof XMLHttpRequest!='undefined') {
	try {
		xmlhttp = new XMLHttpRequest();
	} catch (e) {
		xmlhttp=false;
	}
}
if (!xmlhttp && window.createRequest) {
	try {
		xmlhttp = window.createRequest();
	} catch (e) {
		xmlhttp=false;
	}
}
var url = escape(location.href);
 //xmlhttp.open("GET", "http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url="+url,true);
 //xmlhttp.open("GET", "http://is.gd/api.php?longurl="+url,true);
 xmlhttp.open("GET", "http://bit.ly/api?url="+url,true);
 xmlhttp.onreadystatechange=function() {
  if (xmlhttp.readyState==4) {
   location.href="http://twitter.com/home?status=" + xmlhttp.responseText
  }
 };
 xmlhttp.send(null)
})()

Everything up to the declaration of the "url" var is boilerplate code to get a browser-appropriate XMLHttpRequest object, which is needed to call the URL shortening service. Next, we open a connection to the REST API at our URL shortening service of choice. Then we set a function to be called when the request is complete that redirects us to Twitter with the shortened URL. Finally, the request is sent. Awesome, right?

Too bad it doesn't work.

If you want to try the bookmarklet, create a new bookmark with the crunched version of the above code (remove the line breaks):

javascript:(function(){var xmlhttp=false;if(!xmlhttp&&typeof XMLHttpRequest!='undefined')
{try{xmlhttp=new XMLHttpRequest();}catch(e){xmlhttp=false;}}
if(!xmlhttp&&window.createRequest){try{xmlhttp=window.createRequest();}
catch(e){xmlhttp=false;}}var url=escape(location.href);
xmlhttp.open("GET","http://bit.ly/api?url="+url,true);
xmlhttp.onreadystatechange=function(){if(xmlhttp.readyState==4){
location.href="http://twitter.com/home?status="+xmlhttp.responseText}};
xmlhttp.send(null)})()

When you click the bookmark, nothing will happen and you'll see an error in your browser's javascript error console saying something like "Access to restricted URL denied" or "NS_ERROR_DOM_BAD_URI". The problem is that, for security reasons, browsers do not allow the XMLHttpRequest object to open connections to any server other than the one hosting the current page. What might not be obvious (and wasn't to me) is that javascript in a bookmarklet is considered part of the current page, so opening a connection to any URL shortening service using my bookmarklet will fail because that service is on a different server than the current page. (The interesting exception to this is if you are actually on the web site of the URL shortening service. In fact, the bookmarklet code above does work if you are on bit.ly's site.)

So I guess that explains why I can't find the bookmarket I want on the internet anywhere. At least the next person to try will have this failure story to save their time.

Wait a Minute! That bit.ly Bookmarklet Actually Is the Holy Grail

It wasn't until I starting writing up this post that I took a closer look at the stock bit.ly bookmarklet and said, "What is that javascript doing?" And to my surprise, it does something genius. If you want to try it, go to bit.ly and drag the bookmark link to your browser toolbar, or create a new bookmark and add the following code as the location (remove the line breaks):

javascript:var%20e=document.createElement('script');
e.setAttribute('language','javascript');
e.setAttribute('src','http://bit.ly/bookmarklet/load.php');
document.body.appendChild(e);void(0);

It adds a sidebar to the current page with content pulled from bit.ly's site, and the sidebar includes the shortened URL and links to various services, including Twitter. I haven't dug into exactly how it works, but I think it does the URL shortening on the server side and thus avoids the problem I ran into above. And it works like a charm on my iPhone. So a tip of the hat to bit.ly. This is the bookmarklet that I'll be using.

Los Titeres: Puppets by means of Sweet-smelling Latin Perceptiveness

dsbbridgetmirabel — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 00:53:36 +0000