How To: Shorten and Personalize Web Addresses

My friend Francesco recently rolled out URL123.com, a site that provides some killer URL manipulation features. In his own words, “[URL123] is like tinyurl on steroids...plus, it's in .NET! Link shortening, sharing, and management with some really cool features.“

As far as I'm concerned, URL123 is like nanotechnology. It's magic. You just plug in a long address like https://www.flexwiki.com/default.aspx/FlexWiki.VisitorInformation and out pops a shorter URL to the same Web page: https://url123.com/2rhvh.

Rob Chartier writes “Very clean interface with allot of features including the ability to track all of your URLs and it even allows for you to create your own sub domains. For example, hit https://robc.url123.com/myblog which of course I have pointing to my current blog. Since I can manage these links it’s a nice way to alias URL’s which change often and keep my top list of URL’s super handy (like those pesky MSDN url’s).”

Comments

• Anonymous
  July 16, 2004
  I would also like to give a negative view on this.
  
  Jim Duncan has been using tinyurl which I presume is the same kind of thing (but out for longer) and the problem is that whenever he posts an article and uses the tinyurl URL, I haven't a clue as to whether this is an extract from the SDK; a KB article; an article from MS or whatever.
  
  So I was continually clicking on these references from Jim; waiting for the site to show and then screaming "not again, this is from the SDK" etc.
  
  In other words the use of tinyurl wasted a lot of my time and I in the end requested him to either use the rral URL or to add the information as to where the address was taking us.
• Anonymous
  July 18, 2004
  URL123.com will be adding an option for link creators to display a splash page that loads for 5 seconds before redirecting to the destination URL. The page will display the destination URL in text, giving you the choice of continuing or backing up.