Sniptools

Website URLs are long and difficult to remember. SnipURL allows you to ‘snip’ your long URLs into small, friendly and persistent links for sharing and remembering. Free!

Website URLs are long and difficult to remember. SnipURL allows you to ‘snip’ your long URLs into small, friendly and persistent links for sharing and remembering. Free!

Following are some features of SnipURL — 

1. SHORTEN LONG, DIFFICULT-TO-REMEMBER URLs
Website URLs are getting longer and cumbersome. Not only are they difficult
to remember, it is also a pain sending them in emails because they
wrap on to more than one line and become un-clickable! SnipURL is a
fast and free service that allows you to “snip” your long URLs into small, compact links for sharing in emails and remembering easily.

Consider a web URL like the following (It is a real website, go
ahead and click it if you wish) — 

Something

After “snipping” the same above URL looks like this — 

http://snipurl.com/d (20 characters)
http://snipurl.com/memento (26 characters)

or

http://snurl.com/d (18 characters)
http://snurl.com/memento (24 characters)

SnURL and SnipURL are the same domain. Note that these four URLs are small so you can send them in emails without the fear of them wrapping, meaningful so you can remember and share them in the future, and permanent so if your underlying URL expires or changes you can always modify your snipped URL. (Asa bonus, you can even see the popularity of you URLs by viewing how many people clicked on it). Snipping is easy. You can set up a shortcut (bookmarklet) on your browser and you’re ready to go.

2. IN FIVE LANGUAGES (and more coming soon!)
The website
can be viewed in English,
Chinese,
Japanese,
Spanish and
French. We are also
working on text-only
versions in each of these languages so that makes it 10 types
of websites as we write this. Among these languages, we cover at
least around 80% of the world if not more.

3. MORE INTUITIVE URLs WITH NICKNAMES
Don’t like URLs
like
target=”_blank”>http://snipurl.com/h because they are just some
random text? Then you can make

target=”_blank”>http://snipurl.com/digicam_review and post more
intuitive URLs to your mailing lists or in your newsletters with
sophisticated user tracking etc.

4. PROTECTED SNIPPED URLs (PRIVATE)
Worried that
people can basically guess
http://snipurl.com/1 or
http://snipurl.com/2 or
http://snipurl.com/<some
sequence here>? But want to have a URL that you wish to
track BUT only with users you send the URL to? Then you can
“protect” your snippings with a keycode. SO instead of a URL such
as http://snipurl.com/i, it will
become
http://snipurl.com/i-secret
where “secret” was your password. Private “snippings” are excluded
from our statistics or search of course.

5. INTUITIVE STATISTICS & SEARCH IN “MYSNIPURL”
A
quick registration process gives you access to all the URLs you
have snipped in one screen, along with click-through statistics.
You can also search for the URLs you have snipped by entering
keywords that were contained in the original link or the nicknames
you gave to your snipped URLs. Apart from your own URLs, we also
have some popular statistics under the
EVERYTHING ELSE section, which includes for
instance the Most Popular
 Snippings.

6. EDIT SNIPPINGS!
If your underlying link has expired
or is deadlink, you can always edit your snipping from the
MYSNIPURL page. (None of the comparable websites that we are aware
of offer a possibility to edit your snippings).

7. SHORTCUT
A spiffy shortcut allows you to add a
“bookmarklet” to your browser and “snip” URLs quickly (for people
who do not understand bookmarklets, we have a little visual help:

onclick=”window.open(this.href, this.target,’status=yes,width=780,height=569’); return false”
title=”Opens in a new window: How to drag the shortcut”>http://snipurl.com/SnipThis.htm
which is a flash animation and opens in a new window or a
more detailed
 FAQ).

• Copy to clipboard quickly (pop up window closes automatically
  after you copy the snipped URL in your clipboard)
• Share the snipped URL right from this website
• Compose new mails (using your default email client) …the
  snipped URL is automatically inserted

8. A PUBLIC STATISTICS PAGE WITH FLOOD CONTROL
A public
statistics page
(http://snipurl.com/else.php)
allows you to see the most popular snippings. A “flood control”
mechanism is implemented in this webpage so that unfairly “bumped”
accesses to URLs are carefully chaffed out. And of course, users
can search these too. “PROTECTED” URLs are not included in this
public view of course.

9. REAL REDIRECTS
SnipURL will also let you do “deep
snipping”. So if your snipped website is
“http://snipurl.com/e” (which
points to the website
“http://www.copyright.gov”)
and you have directories and files below that level, you can access
them using
“http://snipurl.com/e/carp/index.html”
which is actually
 http://www.copyright.gov/carp/index.html.

10. SPAM CONTROL
If a snipped redirection is suspected
unfair use of our services and is in violation of our Terms of Use,
we reserve the right to suspend the snipping. An example is http://snipurl.com/th.

11. VISUAL INDICATION OF URL TYPES
When in the statistics webpage, a visual icon indicates what the nature of the
underlying URL is. E.g., http://snipurl.com/else.php, so that you can decide before you unwittingly click on an executable or a PDF file for instance.

12. PERMANANT SNIPPINGS!
Your snipped or shortened
URLs will be left as they are (you can always edit them too, of
course). Snipped URLs never die, they just get spam protected,
if anything.

13. TEXT-ONLY
VERSION FOR DIAL-UP USERS, OR FOR

target=”_blank”>MINIMALISTS IN GENERAL
If you find graphics obstructing your work (although they make the
information more visually intuitive, so we would recommend using
this version if possible), then you can use our toned-down text
version as well. Read more about this in our FAQ.

14. A PERL API
SnipURL now exists as a Perl API for those who are interested! Click here to go get the module at CPAN. (Thanks to Taguchi-san of Cisco for letting us know about this)

This post is tagged short links, shorter URLs, Snipurl, Stash/Code