SHORTEN THOSE LONG ADDRESSES

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. Of course there are all kinds of extremely long words out there but fortunately I've rarely had to use any of them. 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. I looked it up and found one website whose claim to fame is that it boasts having the world's longest single word domain name. If you must know, it's:

"www.llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwyll-llantysiliogogogoch.com"

Reading further, the website says that residents of the village (its name is the long URL), its name meaning St Mary's church in the hollow of the white hazel near a rapid whirlpool and the Church of St Tysilio of the red cave, 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 "snipurl.com/33y9" where the "33y9" 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 "33y9" 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.

The "MySnipURL" section keeps 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