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One of
the things I remember learning as a kid was supposedly
the longest word in the English language. At the time,
it was "Antidisestablishmentarianism." And
after mastering it, I also remember walking around for
days saying it over and over again to impress everyone.
I later learned that
Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis had that
beat hands down. It has 45 letters, defines a lung
disease caused by breathing in certain fine dust
particles and is the longest word in any
English-language dictionary. It's funny the things we
remember growing up. I recently learned that there's
even a word that describes the fear of long words,
Sesquipedalaphobia which I find to be somewhat ironic.
I mention
all of this because there's an online corollary to these
long words. It's the Uniform Resource Locator or URL
which is the address that identifies the location of a
Web page on the World Wide Web. For example, the URL of
my home page is "http://www.computeramerica.com."
When speaking a website URL aloud or typing it into the
browser address field, you can drop the http, colon and
slash slash. In some cases, you can even drop the www,
all of which helps to shorten the thing. But some URLS
are really way too long. One website's claim to fame is
that it boasts having the world's longest single word
domain name. It's:
"www.llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwyll-llantysiliogogogoch.com"
The
website says that residents of the village (its name and
thus the long URL) now hope that visitors from all over
the world will be able to learn more about their
community. I'm sorry tell you good townspeople this but
if visitors have to remember that long URL to find you
online, your website's hits score is going to be very
small. But I do have an excellent suggestion for not
only the town with the long name, but for anyone who
wants to make any long URL a smaller one. There's
website that's designed to shorten website addresses and
it's aptly named SnipURL.
Go to
snipurl.com and it asks you to enter in a long URL to be
shortened. If it has not been "snipped" by
someone else, it will immediately generate a very short
address for you or show you the one already snipped by
someone else. All are preceded by "snipurl.com/"
followed by a newly formed abbreviated URL. In the case
of my website, it generated "http://snipurl.com/uh37x"
where the "uh37x" replaces the "www.computeramerica.com"
portion of my website's address. In the case of the town
with the long name, you can now go there by simply
typing in "snipurl.com/9ngj" which is a LOT
shorter.
Other
useful features of SnipURL is the ability to add
nicknames. In the case of my website I felt that
"uh37x" was not very descriptive so I added
the nickname "compamer." So you will be taken
to my website by just typing in "snipurl.com/compamer"
into any browser.
You can
create your own login at the Snip website to keep track
of all the abbreviated website URLs you created and even
displays how many hits (total number of times everyone
used it) and unique clicks (total number of different
people who clicked on it) used your SnipURL.
The
SnipURL website is a free service and has proved to be
invaluable whenever I want to send someone a website
address that is way too long to type. For example, I use
SnipURL in my weekly email newsletter. Granted readers
can copy and paste in the URL but if for some reason
that doesn't work and they have to manually type it in,
offering an abbreviated URL can prove to be a godsend.
If you
have reason to share long URL website addresses, you're
going to find that brevity is the mother of extension.
www.snipurl.com
(
Craig Crossman
is a national newspaper columnist writing about
computers and technology. He also hosts the No. 1 daily
national computer radio talk show, Computer America,
heard on the Business TalkRadio Network and the
Lifestyle TalkRadio Network — Monday through Friday,
10 p.m.-midnight ET
. For more information, visit his web site at www.computeramerica.com.)
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