What to do with Long Links

The other day, I found a great article on the web. I copied the URL (uniform resource locator, or that little "address" that always starts with http://www...) and saw that, wow, it was nearly EIGHTY characters long! And, many of those characters were odd ones!

Now, I am confident that the internet can "find" that address, but less confident that it is "user friendly." What can one do?

Here are a couple of options. They are called "link shorteners." They... shorten the link! Here's how it works.

1. You copy the URL from the website you want.

2. On a separate tab in your browser, go to one of these:

• www.tinyurl.com
• bitly.com/
• http://goo.gl/
• tiny.cc/

Each of these are basically the same concept. Some ask you to "sign up," but most also offer the service without that. For all of them, you paste the "long" link into a dialogue box, click, and voila, you have a short link to use instead!

Then, copy and paste the short link where ever you need it.

For one thing, this helps with adding links to documents or business cards!