How to keep web addresses on one line of an email
Often I like to give people directions on google maps or some other service and the best way to do this is often just to cut and paste the web address (called URL: Uniform Resource Locator) into an email and hit send. The problem is that some links can be longer than the 80 characters that you can fit onto a single line of a standard text email and some of your recipients may have an email client that doesn’t handle line-breaks inside of URLs correctly. They end up having to cut and paste several lines of URL together inside their browser (and trying to tell your boss or grandma how to do that is far more hassle than it is worth!).
There is an excellent workaround via a little toolbar button that goes on your link toolbar (or favourites) supplied by TinyURL. It converts a long URL like:
into
…all at the touch of a single button. Its a simple idea well executed. TinyURL store the long URL that you supply (either on the website or via the toolbar button) and in turn give you a short url that directs the traffic to them. When someone clicks on the tinyurl.com link above they are taken to the tinyurl.com website and then immediately redirected to the long URL you originally supplied. Perfect.
Like me you’ll probably want to have a toolbar button on your browser so that when you’re on a site with a long URL that you need to send you just have to press a button and you’re given the tiny URL without any copying and pasting and messing about! Do this by going to http://tinyurl.com/#toolbar and dragging the “TinyURL!” link halfway down the page onto your toolbar.
There is just one “con” as far as I can see (which may be a “pro” depending on your point of view), and that is this: a recipient of a URL has no idea where a link is going to take them, and so using TinyURL relies heavily on trust between the sender & recipient. This, of course, is perfect for your affiliate links where you don’t actually want to show that you’re sending them to a random site, but I doubt I would ever click on a URL where I didn’t know or trust the person/organisation and didn’t know where it was going to take me. TinyURL have attempted to address this by setting up a ‘preview’ feature so that you can see where you’re going to be taken before you actually go - it is a decent attempt at solving the problem, but really I would like the impossible: to go directly to URLs where I trust the person who sent them, or to be shown a preview where I don’t know or trust the person. I’d also like the moon on a stick… :)
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