Wednesday, February 16, 2005

Shortening URLs

The DigBig - Long URLs shortened service lets you map long (often meaningless) URLs (such as deep links) to shorter equivalents that (unfortunately) are also meaningless...

The DigBig info page offers an example of a long URL into a multimap map for a particular postcode -

"This long URL (152 characters) ...
http://www.multimap.com/map/browse.cgi
?client=public&db=pc&addr1=&client=pub
lic&addr2=&advanced=&addr3=&pc=SW1A1AA
&quicksearch=SW1A+1AA&cidr_client=none

... is shortened to just 22 characters ...
http://digbig.com/3bbd"

How much more useful if I could also map that onto a sensible string, such as the following, for instance:
digbig.com//SW1A1AA
or possibly
digbig.com//postcodeMap/SW1A1AA
or
digbig.com//maps/westminster
or something a bit more intuitive....I personally don't think I can remember many more random 4 character strings!

The path would let me build up my own list of short (ish!) meaningful URLs, a bit like at ouseful.open.ac.uk/

1 Comments:

Blogger rakerman said...

notlong.com lets you specify the short URL you want to create e.g.

coolposting.notlong.com

I usually use tinyurl.com, but it creates the same sort of meaningless URLs that digbig does.

-- Richard Akerman
http://scilib.typepad.com/

12:12 PM  

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