Miniaturize Your URLs in GMail

TinyURL.com is probably the oldest online web address compressor around. Cut and paste whatever long-winded, email-busting URL you like and it will crush it down to a very small address instead, that will not wrap or break in an email message, or anywhere else for that matter. If you are familiar with TinyURL already then I won’t preach to the choir any longer. But, you will also know from experience that opening a separate tab or browser window for TinyURL cutting and pasting the long URL then selecting and grabbing the tiny one, then opening your email client or preferably GMail tab/window….gets….to be….a rather long…..winded process.

Instead, fire up the Greasemonkey (a scripting tool for Firefox) and grab the TinyURL-GMail plugin. I am assuming that thousands of IE users are going to see the serious benefits of this hack and switch rightaway, but if not, then please use the random post button to the right to find something relevant to read.

Anyway, once you have Greasemonkey greased and the TinyGmail plugin plugged in, then fire up GMail and check out how much easier it is to crush an unwieldy URL right down to a tiny one for mailing out. Simply paste in your long URL, highlight it within the Gmail message and hit Ctrl Shift and T keys all together. the Ctrl-Shift-T combination should almost instantly convert something that is too long to something that is a lot shorter. No snickering at the back, please!

There are a few of technical reasons not to use this script, like the fact that GMail already has a half-decent way of pasting in URLs, some people don’t like to see tinyurls because they could be pointing to something NSFW or whatever and there is no way of knowing based on the URL, and also Ctrl-Shft-T in Firefox is usually reserved for opening recently opened tabs. Thanks to commentators at Lifehacker for helping me us out on the tab problem.