Tiny Toonz

This is pretty old, but there are some utilities that seem pretty silly, and yet there's a huge benefit in having them around. And this is one of them. Sometimes you have tremendously long URLs (or even not so long) and it's difficult to tell others, especially over the phone or IM or whatever.

Recently, Aslak Hellesoy, one of the RSpec guys, was giving a talk on RSpec at Railsconf. He didn't have a projector. So he made the slides on a webpage on his website. But there were just enough characters on the URL to make it a pain to tell people to type this in their browser.

An audience participant said to use "tinyurl", the linked website above. It takes a long URL, and creates a small one. When the user types that in, they are redirected to the longer one.

Pretty convenient, eh?

There are tons of things like this on the net. But the average person can hardly keep up with it. I mean, this seems like the silliest idea ever, but once you see why someone would use it, you end up using it. Not often, but enough when the need is there.