Shorten Those Long URLs

Have you ever gone to send the URL of a webpage to a colleague via email, only to find that the URL that you paste into the message is about 150 characters long? Sometimes the URL wraps to the next line in their email client, and when they click the link it's broken. Sometimes the URL gets passed around until it loses it's initial meaning—someone looks at it and thinks, "Where in hell is this going to take me?"

To answer those problems there are several free online services that offer shorter URLs that link to the original. Some like tiny URL will generate short addresses but the results tend to have rather cryptic names; the beauty of Notlong is that you can prepend your own name to the shortened address. Use it with your own hosted URL and it's like having your own domain name, only with .notlong.com instead of simply .com. What's more it's permanent and free!

It took me all of five seconds to get mactips.notlong.com as a shortened URL for this site
(http://www.andrewburke.orcon.net.nz/mac/index.htm).

At Notlong you can grab a bookmarklet that enables you to simply click when you're viewing a site with a long name—a window pops up with a field where you enter your preferred short name. If it's available you are given the name, along with a secret address where you can manage the name, track the number of people who navigate via the shortened URL etc.