Skip to content

Wide URLs with WideURL.com

For years now, I’ve been a great fan of TinyURL.com. That web site allows you to create a short representation of a longer URL, for use in email.

One of the problems with those URLs, though, and with URLs in general, is that they’re misleadingly short. A particular web page may have a lot of significance, but if it doesn’t take up much of your message, there’s just no way for the recipient to see this at a glance.

WideURL.com fixes this. It creates an URL with more visual impact.

For example, here’s the WideURL for this post: http://wideurl.com/aitch-tee-tee-pea-colon-double-slash-oh-ess-tee-double-ee-ell-ee-dot-see-oh-em-slash-aye-are-see-aitch-eye-vee-ee-ess-slash-two-double-zero-six-slash-zero-four-slash-doubleyou-eye-dee-ee-you-are-ell. That’s much more significant-looking than simply http://osteele.com/archives/2006/04/wideurl, I think you can agree.

This was written by Oliver. Posted on Saturday, April 1, 2006, at 9:36 am. Filed under Amusements, Projects. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

7 Comments

  1. dvb wrote:
    Tuesday, April 4, 2006 at 5:35 am | Permalink
  2. Lyndon wrote:

    Hi Oliver, a very entertaining April Fools hack ;-) .

    Wednesday, April 5, 2006 at 4:43 pm | Permalink
  3. Ryan Parman wrote:

    You don’t seem to have left any other way of getting in touch with you… not even a contact form or anything. Your svn2ics tool is returning PHP errors in the generated calendars. I was hoping that either you can fix it, or you can release the source so that the rest of us can use this (I assume — I haven’t seen it functional yet) seemingly awesome tool.

    Saturday, April 8, 2006 at 7:41 pm | Permalink
  4. anina.net wrote:

    i am thinking of using dreamhost as my host and blog platform. what do you think about their service?

    Sunday, April 30, 2006 at 12:58 pm | Permalink
  5. Lazlo Steele wrote:

    You seem to have the same last name as me. What a coincidence.

    Thursday, July 27, 2006 at 6:51 am | Permalink
  6. Rinogo wrote:

    I’m seconding Ryan’s frustrations. I’ve been trying to find a way to contact you, Oliver, but I can’t find a way to do so. If you’re afraid of spammers, perhaps you should try something like http://warproof.com.

    Monday, May 28, 2007 at 11:42 pm | Permalink
  7. Vijay wrote:

    why-oh-you-slant-tick-are-ee-space-eye-en-
    space-aye-space-bee-aye-double-ell-double-oh-en

    Friday, June 1, 2007 at 1:34 pm | Permalink