No More Random Strings

In a stack of papers called Technology.

  • Jul
  • 05
  • 2008

A favorite site of mine whose links adorn several of my handouts every year, TinyURL makes long and complicated Web addresses shorter and easier to type. It creates a random string of numbers and letters (like 6l9s9p) to stand in for that horribly complex URL you just got from YouTube (watch?v=xFO0Zo0IU5A). My classroom Web page is a lengthy address, so I created a TinyURL for it.

It’s nice to have a URL that’s short, but it doesn’t do much good if no one can remember it.

TinyURL has stepped it up: instead of creating something short and meaningless like tinyurl.com/2tx (a link to someone moving to Texas?), create something short and descriptive, like tinyurl.com/google. Using their new custom alias option, type in a meaningful phrase that will become the link, provided that it’s not already taken (like tinyurl.com/seal — imagine my disappointment). Now we can give students short and memorable links to important sites.

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