How I shorten URLs on a Mac
These are the programs that you will need: Quicksilver and a browser. Pretty simple, eh?
I doubt anyone who reads this blog does not know about TinyURL or other URL shorteners: snipurl, dwarfurl, and urlTea. I am sure there are others. I wanted to share with you how I shorten my URLs because I just recently learned about it. Perhaps I am a little slow on the uptake, but I am okay with that.
Here’s what I do: Let’s say I want to share a link on Twitter, or send it in an email. There are two ways I do this. One is using the very handy Quicksilver, and the other is using a new URL shrinker I just recently learned about.
For Quicksilver: First, I copy the URL of my website. Then I invoke Quicksilver (be sure to have the Web Searches module installed).
Type a “ti” to get the TinyURL search up, and then tab twice and paste my link into the search field.
When I hit enter, the following screen will appear, and with a quick highlight and copy, I can copy my new tinyurl URL. Pretty handy.
The even easier way is with a new website I just found: is.gd. When you get to this website, you need to drag the bookmarklet to your bookmarks toolbar in either Firefox or Safari.
Now, whenever you visit a page whose URL you want to shorten, you simply click the bookmarklet, and it shrinks your URL to as small as it possibly can be, then it highlights the result automatically, and you can quickly cut and paste it.
I use TinyURL when I want to right click and “copy link location” or I already have the link copied, and is.gd for when I am just casually browsing the web.
Both of these web apps allow you to include a preview window hosted on their servers so that people can view them. For TinyURL you need to add a “preview.” to the beginning of any TinyURL generated URL, as you can see in the TinyURL image above. For is.gd, it is much simpler, you just add a hyphen (-) to the end of the address and it will give your viewer a preview. So, http://is.gd/46w- is what that would look like.
Both these options will give you a way to shorten your URLs, especially those pesky Amazon.com links.
Do you know of any faster or better ways to shorten URLs?
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An alternative method is to add a shrink URL option to the OSX Services Menu. There are two software options that enable that to be done simply. The first is here, http://tinyurl.com/2awonp from Riverdark Studios. The second is here, http://tinyurl.com/y26hpt called “This Service” from Waffle Software, which enables several different services to be added to the Services Menu.
FYI… TinyURL also has a bookmarklet available at http://tinyurl.com/#toolbar
This is an example of using Quicksilver to make a simple workflow much much harder. Tinyurl and urltea and basically all of these services offer a bookmarklet just like the one you took this entire post to describe. Why you would have been sticking Quicksilver into your Tinyurl workflow is beyond me.
This is a handy tip for anyone who doesn’t know it, but it has nothing to do with is.gd. All of these services already offer it, including tinyurl.
I do like Kris’s suggestion to use the service menu as an option, though.
Apple Mail provides a really quick and clean way to provide web links in the body of your email text:
1. Copy the URL from the web page to which you wish to link.
2. Type your outgoing message in the email body, then select a word or words that you would like the reader to click on to go to the web page.
3. Once your selection is highlighted, right-click on your selection, then left click on “Edit Link”. In the drop down window, right click and paste, then click OK.
Your selection will become a highlighted, underlined link for readers to click on. I have yet to find a URL of such length that it will not paste (although I’m sure there is a limit). It’s clean and looks quite professional. You can eliminate any breaking of URLs and provide a link with as little as 1 letter or number, although I use words and phrases to make my point. This is a 1 time paste method that is very simple and clean.
@4 Steve. Assuming one is using Safari isn’t it easier and that one wants to email a link to what is in the address bar, isn’t it easier to just go to the File Menu and select “Mail Link to This Page”? In fact, using the ShrinkURL add-on to the Services menu I mentioned above, it’s possible to shorten the URL directly in the address bar before mailing the link. Similarly, if one just pastes a link into Mail:app, you can then highlight it and use the Services menu to shorten the URL directly in the message.
you actually use quicksilver to make the process really really easier.
following the instructions on this page:
http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2007/11/long-and-shortened-url-scripts/
it gives you a script that you can call up with quicksilver that will take the url of the frontmost safari window, send it to metamark shortening service, and then return the result to your clipboard.
here’s the script:
tell application “Safari”
set longURL to URL of front document
end tell
set cmd to “curl http://metamark.net/api/rest/simple?long_url=” & longURL
set shortURL to do shell script cmd
set the clipboard to shortURL as text
beep
Or you can use the French website http://www.petitsliens.com/
They even have a DashBoard Widget !
http://www.petitsliens.com/OSXWidget/
Hi All,
Didn’t have time to read everything, so not sure if the ‘TinyURL Creator’ plug-in for Firefox was mentioned, but I think it rocks. After the plug-in is installed, just select it from the ‘Tools’ menu in Firfox and the URL gets shrunk & copied to the clipboard. You can even set it’s preference to bypass it’s little dialog box. Slick! Then select ‘Send Link…’ in the Firefox ‘File’ menu and after your email app opens & creates an email with the long URL, just paste the TinyURL over it. Presto!
Hope that’s helpful.
Cheers!
-Mark
The easiest way is to install the Service menu items for TinyURL, and then to enable Service Menu access in Quicksilver.
You can then paste the URL into quicksilver, and choose to have it shrink the URL directly to the clipboard. Even easier than the bookmarklet, because you don’t have to select and copy the text from the tinyurl site.
As abelara mentioned, there is a QS script to automate this entire process and plop the shortened URL on the keyboard:
http://twitter.com/jsnell/statuses/434108652
If any other QS nerds are out there, I wrote about that and other useful QS scripts here:
http://jwdunn.com/2007/11/29/how-i-use-quicksilver-ii-scripts/