Moourl - The web's cutest URL shortening service
Posted by: Chris Rault in useful tips, tools, elswhere, cool services Mar 27, 2008
Who's got a tiny what??
I'm talking about TINY URL's (universal resource locator). I am sure that many of you are familiar with the various url shortening services out there (such as the original tinyurl.com), but for those who don't here is a quick summary:
"TinyURL (tinyurl.com) is a web service created by Kevin Gilbertson that provides short aliases to redirect long URLs. Gilbertson, a web developer, launched the service in January 2002 because he wanted to be able to link directly to newsgroup postings which frequently had long and cumbersome addresses."
In essence what this is doing is taking a really long (hard to remember!) url and turning it into a super short (easy to remember) url.
An example of this could be taking a long url like this:
http://www.joomlajunkie.com/extensions/professional-joomla-extensions/ultimate-joomla-blogging-package.html and turning it into this http://tinyurl.com/2b3zgd. By clicking the short "tinyurl" the user is automatically redirected to the full url.
Why would anyone want to do that, you say?
Hmmm, lets see now.. Having a short easy to remember could be used in forums, emails, newsletters, blog posts - the list goes on and on and on. It is especially useful when sending newsletters where you cater for a text version of the contents.
Give me some milky tiny url's goodness
I recently stumbled across an interesting twist on the tiny url concept and that twist is called moourl.com. Not only is the site 10 trillion times nicer to look at (important if you have even the smallest creative flair in you), but it also takes the concept one step further, allowing you to add your own url alias and also has a a neat bookmarklet to make your milky url shortening even easier!
So if we take the original example link:
http://www.joomlajunkie.com/extensions/professional-joomla-extensions/ultimate-joomla-blogging-package.html and use the default "moourl" conversion, we end up with: http://moourl.com/s60f7. Much better right? Well, MooUrl takes it one step further! You can now specify your very own short url alias. So instead of the "s60f7" you can use something a bit more relevant to the target page, such as http://moourl.com/ultimatebloggingpack.
Pretty neat, eh? Click here to check it out!
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