Use TinyURL to Track Sites Easily

TinyURL is a surprisingly versatile tool that I'm surprised I've only just come to appreciate. The service basically works like this, you insert a url (preferably something long that's hard to remember) and TinyURL gives you a short URL that will redirect to that site.

Here's an example:

• I enter http://www.bill2me.com/about/.
• TinyURL turns it into http://tinyurl.com/3y4esu.
• Entering http://tinyurl.com/3y4esu.

After plugging in several URLs I've learned that on average TinyURL tends to take any URL (no matter how long) and cut it down to around 25- 30 characters. While the resulting URL won't necessarily be easy to remember it's certainly easier to write down.

One thing I've started to do is record TinyURLs on my Google.com personal homepage. This way I can check them out from another computer at a later time and don't need to worry about long urls that track off a page.

If you regularly work in forums you can probably see where this would be useful as well. There's nothing worse than a long URL that destroys a page layout!