The address of an individual Web page is a Uniform Resource Locator, or URL for short. Depending on how a website is built, the URL in the address bar can grow very lengthy as you click on links and move deeper into a particular site; the more you click, the larger the URL will often get. This lends itself to long URLs that are difficult to read and nearly impossible to remember. You may not be concerned with this until you need to share a link with others via e-mail, social networks, newsletters, blog posts and more.
To combat the problem of large and unmanageable links, URL-shortening websites began springing up in 2001. Now there are hundreds of these across the Internet, and most are free. One of the leaders in the URL-shortening service is bit.ly, whose links receive more than 150 million clicks per day.
This very simple URL shortening site can be found at http://bit.ly.To shorten a URL, copy the address you’d like to shorten and then paste it into the “Shorten with bit.ly” box on the homepage. Next, click the “Shorten” button, and the shortened URL will appear in the “Your Link” box. Click on the shortened link, and it’s automatically copied to your clipboard. You can then paste the link wherever you like.
Tip – The real value of bit.ly is exposed after you put the short URL to work. After the short URL is created and shared, the bit.ly service will track its use from that day forward. You can see this by adding a plus sign “+” to the end of any bit.ly URL. For example, in Tech Tip #37 we created a bit.ly link (http://bit.ly/aMBm05) that directed readers to the KETS contract hardware page on the KDE website. To see how often this link has been used, add a plus sign to the end of the URL, like this http://bit.ly/aMBm05+.
Here are a few more that you might consider using:
- http://Tiny.cc and http://tinyurl.com/ – these services allow you to customize the name of your short URL
- https://go.usa.gov/ – the URL ends in “.gov,” but account creation is required
To provide feedback or submit a technical topic/question you’d like to see addressed, please send e-mails to matt.jury@education.ky.gov.
Published 12/10/2010