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Make Shrunken Links Easy to Remember with MeaningfulURL
Posted by Kevin Purdy at 2:30 AM on February 6, 2008
Link-shortening services like TinyURL are great for sharing complex URLs (hello, Amazon) over email or IM, but most of us would have a hard time pulling a link like tinyurl.com/3yw6ew from the tops of our heads. MeaningfulURL provides a link-shortening service that lets you customise the name your short URL gets. Paste a long link, choose a prefix like "invite.to." or "enter.to," then add your own text after that to make the link, like "http://enter.to/mycoolsite." The bad news is that the freely-provided links expire in 3 days (you can shell out $2 or $3 for certain prefixes), but for a long URL you need to get at from anywhere, MeaningfulURL might do the trick.
Comments (AU Comments · US Comments)
There are currently no AU comments for this post.
pham
Posted 5:40 AM 6/2/08
ThnLnk does the same thing--for free and forever. See [thnlnk.com]
They also have basic statistics and a pretty cool "apps" interface to Google Maps, Skreemr, Yelp, etc. See [blog.thnlnk.com]
pham
Debajit
Posted 5:40 AM 6/2/08
I use notlong.com -- which allows you permanent url's of the form
someName.notlong.com -- easy to remember.
I don't see why someone would want to pay for a service like this.
Also, if you have your own domain, you can create your own short meaningful url's by editing your .htaccess (if you're running Apache). Again, free and permanent.
Debajit
Dai Tryon
Posted 5:40 AM 6/2/08
I just tested the service (to create a link to Download.com), and got this message:
"Our system detected that your REAL URL may contain illegal or adult content, so the meaningful url you registered is now Pending Approval.
It will be approved within 48 hours after we confirm your URL."
Thumbs down.
Dai Tryon
natonic
Posted 5:40 AM 6/2/08
Check out [decenturl.com] also. They do the same thing for the most part (I don't think they let you pick a custom prefix) and they have an automatic mechanism that auto-generates a more friendly URL.
natonic
USBman
Posted 5:40 AM 6/2/08
Pay for that? I think not! Why, when there are free options out there that do same thing?
Examples include: [decenturl.com] (via [www.labnol.org]), or [notlong.com], or [doiop.com]
USBman
jermainePropane
Posted 11:40 AM 16/3/08
Do the same thing with bits of text and code at [textsnip.com]
jermainePropane