URL Shortcut?

[Brangwen]

Fellow Members:

I'm running a nonprofit website that has a very long and cumbersome name, making it very hard for members to check the site without typing about 15+ characters into the address bar.

I recently saw a similar site that after typing the long name, like my site, it went to the site with a much shorter address. This is an example: Their URL was www.Hingham.com/UACH/MA/21/ then when I reached it, I noticed the site name (URL) is something like www.Simple.org --- much easier for prospective viewers to remember!

How is this done? Did the other organization rent a site then shortcut or redirect to it? Curious how I can make my organization's URL easier to remember ...

Thx.

Brangwen

[John Prophet]

I think in that case they just registered that short name.

http://www.register.com/ or a million other sites can do domain name registration.

So for instance you might have a long goofy name from your free web site space from your ISP ..like ---> www.jughead/member12003/iso6.com

Then you register a short name like www.jugheadjoe.com and then the domain register peeps make your long name point to the short name.

So naturally all the big sites have several or many names that just point to the main name.

for example www.antivirus.com points to and ends up at http://www.trendmicro.com/en/home/us/personal.htm

And my knowledge is pretty basic on this stuff but I am sure someone here could easily do a reverse look up and figure out what all different names point to http://www.trendmicro.com/en/home/us/personal.htm etc.

JP

[John Prophet]

of course you can also go here http://tinyurl.com/ where you can enter a long url and it will give you a short one back, lol. Very cool. Then you could just tell peeps to learn the short one, hehe.

JP

[Brangwen]

John:

The "tinyurl" is for real?

Thx.

Brangwen

[John Prophet]

yep, real. Try it.

I used to use it a lot for links to my personal webpage. I would try to post the huge long links into threads and they would never work, so I used tinyurl to make nice short links.

try it, youll see.

JP