URL posts

Add URL tooltips to Firefox with a handy add-on

by Lee Mathews Nov 12th 2009

I'm not a big fan of status bars in browsers. Most of the time, they're just wasting 20 or so pixels of vertical display space.

That doesn't mean I want to miss out on the functions the status bar provides - like displaying the destination of links I hover over.

The URL Tooltip addon offers a simple remedy for that. Once installed, you'll see a tooltip balloon whenever you park your pointer on a link. And never mind the status bar - it's nice to see the link appear in the spot you're already looking at.

For those of you running a netbook, this is a great little add-on to make part of your add-on arsenal.

And no, I did not just buy a Maximus keyboard - just in case you were wondering...

[via Mozilla Links]

Tags: balloon, hover, link, tooltip, url

Filed under: Internet, News

ICANN approves non-Latin characters for domain names

by Brad Linder Oct 30th 2009

As expected, the international agency that regulates internet domain names has approved a new rule that allows URLs to be written using non-Latin characters. In other words, native speakers of Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Hindi, and other languages will be able to spell out web addresses using their oown alphabets.

Roughly 1.6 billion internet users speak languages that don't use Latin characters. That's half of the people that usee the internet.

Officials describe the move as the "biggest technical change to the Internet since it was created four decades ago." Nations and territories will be able to apply for internet extensions reflecting their regions starting on November 16th. We'll probably start seeing Internationalized Domain Names starting in mid-2010.

[via TechCrunch]

Tags: domain-name, domain-names, icann, url, web-address, web-addresses

Filed under: Internet, News

ICANN set to approve web addresses using non-Latin characters

by Brad Linder Oct 26th 2009

There are web pages written in virtually every living language. If you read Japanese, Korean, Arabic, or Hebrew, odds are you can find web sites written in your native tongue. But in order to find them, you'll probably have to enter a string of Western characters into your browser's address bar.

That's because up until now, the organization that oversees domain names has only accepted URLs with Latin characters. But this week the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is expected to approve a new rule allowing addresses to be written in different scripts, including Arabic, Greek, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, and Cyrillic (Russian).

While the change might not affect English speakers reading this web site all that much, this is huge news for the 1.6 billion internet users who speak languages that don't use Latin characters. So while we have no plans to change the web address for Download Squad, I did consult with Google Translate today to learn that the site would be called something like загрузка Сборная in Russian. Because, you never know.

The new rule could be adopted as soon as Friday, although we probably wouldn't see the new Internationaliised Domain names (IDNs) until mid 2010.

ICANN has been looking at the change for a few years. But there have been technical kinks to work out. Essentially, under the new system, users will be able to enter URLs in a variety of different scripts and the domain name system will apply some new translation techniques in order to ensure that users are taken to the correct web page.

Tags: domain-name, icann, url, web-address

Filed under: Internet, Web

Login to Facebook with your vanity URL

by John Burke Sep 23rd 2009

Here's a bit of ground breaking news for you. Facebook, known for their popular social networking website and recently flurry of product and service enhancements, has made possibly the biggest change yet. With over 50 million vanity names reserved since the social networking website started allowing users to pick their own unique URL, they have now announced that the names can be used to sign in as well.

Now, instead of having to remember an entire email address, XoXoSuperGirl111 or Bob or whatever name you chose can be used to login with. For me, that whole @me.com was a killer to remember.

You'll still be able to login using your email, mobile phone number or through a Facebook Connect website as always, this just adds another (more convenient?) way to sign in. I guess it's good that Facebook is keeping themselves balanced. After all, it'd be awful if all they did was release new features and functionality. That would almost be too much.

Tags: Connect, Facebook, Login, URL, Vanity URL, VanityUrl

Filed under: Text, Features, Social Software, Analysis

Should Twitter really count URL characters against you?

by Jason Clarke Sep 13th 2009

Tweet URL Length

URL shorteners, while convenient, are bad for the web. They hide the true destination that they are pointing to, giving bad guys yet another tool in their arsenal, while conditioning web users to blindly trust the links they are clicking on. Further, as the debacle with tr.im showed us, URL shortening services aren't necessarily permanent.

It's no coincidence that the rise in popularity of URL shorteners closely mirrors the rise in popularity of Twitter; Twitter's 140 character limit is the special ingredient that makes Twitter so compelling, but it's also what made short URLs valuable. Some of you will say that short URLs are useful for other reasons - for example, in print. True, but Twitter is by far the place they are used most.

So, with a 140 character limit, how could Twitter eliminate URL shorteners? Well, first, let's look at the reason for the 140 character limit in the first place. It was chosen because Twitter expected SMS messages to be the primary way that users would interact with the service. While there are many users using it that way, their numbers are far eclipsed by the number of users using Twitter on its native web site, or using one of the plentiful Twitter client apps that are available for both desktop computers and mobile phones.

Tags: character limit, character-limit, CharacterLimit, client apps, client-apps, ClientApps, limit, magic number, magic-number, MagicNumber, Mobile Phones, Mobile-Phones, MobilePhones, short messages, short urls, short-messages, short-urls, ShortMessages, ShortUrls, sms messages, sms users, sms-messages, sms-users, SmsMessages, SmsUsers, twitter, twitter character limit, twitter-character-limit, TwitterCharacterLimit, url, url shortener, url-shortener, UrlShortener

Filed under: Utilities, Web services, Microblogging

La petite url is a personal URL shortener for Wordpress

by Jay Hathaway Aug 12th 2009

The recent shutdown and reopening of URL-shrinking service Tr.im drew a lot of attention to one of the most troubling questions about short URL sites: when one of them shuts down, what happens to the links? To avoid worrying about what a URL shortener might do with your links, you might want to scope out la petite url, a Wordpress plugin for creating tiny links using your own domain name.

La petite url creates links to your Wordpress pages using 5 lowercase characters, something like yoururl.com/nfpqd. This way, your domain name stays in the URL, letting people know which site they're clicking through to. You can also automatically display a short link next to each post, making it easier for readers to spread your links. The disadvantage? Unless you have a tiny domain name, your shrunken URL is going to be significantly longer than the ones you get from ow.ly, bit.ly or tr.im.

Tags: shorturl, tinyurl, url, url-shortener, wordpress, wordpress-plugin, wordpressplugins

Filed under: Internet, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

Digg's new Diggbar will destroy other short url services

by Lee Mathews Apr 2nd 2009

Everyone knows about the power of Digg. We've seen it first hand many times here at DLS with waves of Digg faithful pouring in when a hot story hits the feed. Today, they've taken the gloves off and come out swinging at other short URL and social sharing services with the new Diggbar.

Apart from making it easy to submit items to Digg, the toolbar also integrates with Facebook and Twitter and can send links via email. There's nothing to install, just a simple bookmarklet that should work with any web browser. Click it and the page reloads with the Diggbar perched on top, ready to submit the page to Digg and share stats on previously dugg items.

A short URL is automatically created for the page, and the Diggbar has one big advantage over other competitors like TinyURL, bit.ly, and Is.gd: name recognition. There's no doubt that the service will benefit from not only from Digg's popluarity, but also from Kevin Rose's massive Twitter following and general "star power."

No need to visit Digg to view comments, either. Just click the button and they'll appear between the bar and the page itself. The bar also includes buttons to visit a random site or check out related Digg submissions.

As if that weren't enough, Thwirl integration is coming. Once it's live, users will be able to use Digg as their default short URL service. Since the features have been made available via Digg's API, developers of other apps can start taking advantage of it as well.

Maybe you don't think Diggbar will destroy the others, but there's no denying it'll make some serious noise.

[via Digg Blog]

Tags: bookmarklet, digg, diggbar, shortener, tinyurl, twhirl, url

Tr.im shortens and tweets URLs, tracks stats, and more

by Lee Mathews Nov 17th 2008

There are a lot of god URL truncators out there, like Snipr, Is.gd, and TinyURL. For a new service to stand out, it's got to bring something interesting to the table.

Tr.im does just that. Apart from offering URLs that are about as short as you're going to get (8 characters on my tests), they've added a couple interesting features.

For starters, Tr.im will truncate your link and automatically update your Twitter or Identi.ca status. The service also tracks stats and allows commenting on your URLs. There is, of course, a bookmarklet and API access is provided for developers.

Creating an account allows you to store your history and gives you access to a number of useful preference settings. Tr.im doesn't even require creating a new account to log in - just use your Twitter credentials.

You can choose to auto-copy new URLs to the clipboard, automatically trim and tweet, and save your Twitter and Identi.ca passwords. Another interesting feature is Tr.im's retweet service, which automatically adds popular submissions to their Twitter feeds.

It's an excellent service, and may just be my new favorite truncator.

Tags: shortener, truncator, tweet-this, twitter, url, url-shortener

Filed under: Internet, Web services

Find out useless, useful info about a web page with URL-info

by Brad Linder Jul 23rd 2008

Ever wonder which site provides a higher ratio of internal to external links, Engadget or Download Squad? Want to know if there's a hidden message in the headers of a web page? URl-info can help.

Here's how it works. Visit the site, enter a URL, and hit go. Pretty simple, eh? What you get is some basic information about the web page, including the server operating system, what kind of web analytics the site uses (although the only one we managed to detect was Google Analytics on a handful of sites), and a list of images and internal and external links on a site.

If you click the Images tab, you can scroll your mouse over the URLs of images to see thumbnail versions. The links tab provides a list of links and a nifty graphic showing the ratio of internal to external links. In other words, you can find a whole bunch of information you never really needed. But if you have nothing better to do with your day than try to dig up some stats about your favorite web sites, this is the tool for you.

[via Daily Gyan]

Tags: headers, url, url-info, urlinfo, web-sites

Filed under: Internet, Web services, web 2.0

TinyURL adds custom domain feature

by Brad Linder Jul 9th 2008

TinyURL is the grandaddy of URL shortening services. Want to take a long URL and squeeze it into an easy to email, tweet, or otherwise share package? Just plop it into TinyURL and the service will spit out a short string of characters you can share with others. But historically those characters have been pretty much meaningless, making TinyURL addresses difficult to remember.

TinyURL recently rolled out the ability to create custom domains. Just type in a word or phrase that you want to associate with the longer URL, and you could get a domain like http://tinyurl.com/downloadsquad. There's just one catch: If someone's already used the URL, you can't use it. So you might want to use the name of your web site, spouse, or dog sparingly. Otherwise you'll wind up with someting like http://tinyurl.com/downloadsquad4h85sy.

[via WebWare]

Tags: domain, tinyurl, url

Filed under: Internet, Search

Get your .ASIA domains today, before it doesn't matter anymore

by Brad Linder Mar 26th 2008

Starting today anyone can sign up for a domain name ending in .ASIA on a first come, first served basis. For the past month or so, DotAsia, the organization overseeing the new top level domain was accepting registrations on a limited basis.

But that .ASIA domain might not be as valuable as you'd think. Well, sure, first of all, it's going to take a while before anyone even thinks of typing .ASIA into their browser's location bar. Nothing beats .COM for that right now. But blogger Cabel Maxfield Sasser also noticed an interesting trend during a recent trip to Japan. Many companies aren't advertising their URLs anymore. Instead, they're providing keywords that you can type into a search box to find their company.

It makes sense. After all, most of the good, easy to remember domain names were sold years ago. Sure, you could post your incredibly long URL on an ad in the subway, but what are the odds that people will remember it when they get home? If you're pretty confident in your search engine optimization techniques (or if you've paid for placement), why not advertise a keyword or two? But if the trend does take off, it means that we might all start placing a lot less importance on domain names in the future.

[via LifeRocks 2.0 and Boing Boing]

Tags: .asia, advertising, asia, domain-registration, search, url

Filed under: Internet, Utilities, Web services

LinkBunch turns multiple links into one

by Jay Hathaway Feb 11th 2008

Pasting long multipart links can be an unsightly waste of space when you're talking on IM, text, or Twitter. There are dozens of web services that will cut a URL down to size, but when you're dealing with a group of links, it can still take multiple copies and pastes to share everything.

LinkBunch is a service that does exactly what it sounds like it should do: condenses multiple URLs into one short address. Just paste them all into one text box, hit a button, and your new, slimmer URL is ready to go. Your days of sending just one LOLcat picture at a time are over!

When someone clicks on your LinkBunch, they're directed to a page that shows all the links you included. This would be handy by itself, but the LinkBunch developers took the obvious next step and added an "open entire bunch" button, which pops each link into a new tab.

The major feature we found missing from LinkBunch was a bookmarklet to automatically bunch all open tabs, which would mean even less copying and pasting. We'd also like to see direct links to open an entire bunch, without first going to the page and clicking. Fortunately, it looks like the developers plan to release a LinkBunch API, which means these features might not be missing for long.

Tags: linkbunch, tinyurl, url

Filed under: Internet, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Productivity, Mozilla, Browser Tips, web 2.0

Morning Coffee: why do we assume we only get one homepage?

by Danny Mendez Jan 28th 2008

Why do we assume we only get one homepage? For those willing to explore the potential of their browser, we'd like to show you a little out-of-the-box thinking in the form of Morning Coffee.

Though Firefox can set a series of tabs as your "homepage" (select "Use Current Pages" from the preferences menu), this free add-on (shout out to all the free software coders out there) gives you the ability to choose when to open which homepage.

Say, for example, you like to read the NYTimes on days when you work, but you prefer Google Reader on Saturdays and your church's weekly bulletin on Sunday mornings. This program, as you may have already assumed, does just that.

[via gHacks]

Tags: firefox, home page, HomePage, morning coffee, MorningCoffee, mozilla, site, url

Filed under: Internet, Security, Utilities, Web services

Find out where that TinyURL link is really taking you

by Brad Linder Dec 31st 2007

If you've spent more than a few minutes on the internet, you probably know that it's not usually a good idea to click on a link if you don't know where it takes you. The last thing you need is to visit a site that wants to install malware on your PC. Or almost as bad, a link that takes you to a site with explicit contact while you're at work, or perhaps using your mother's computer.

But popular URL-shortening services like TinyURL ask you to do exactly that: click on a link without really knowing where it will take you. Fortunately, TinyURL also offers a way to preview links before visiting them. All you have to do is visit TinyURL's preview page and click "enable previews." The service will add a cookie to your browser so that every time you click on a TinyURL link you'll first be taken to a page showing the complete URL. You can click "disable previews" to remove the cookie if you don't feel like going through a two step process every time you click on an abbreviated link in the future.

If you want to share a shortened link with others but make sure they always see the preview page, just add preview to the URL. For example, http://tinyurl.com/by8fm will take you to the Download Squad home page, while http://preview.tinyurl.com/by8fm will take you to a page letting you know that you're about to visit the Download Squad home page.

[via the How-To Geek]

Tags: abbreviation, security, tinyurl, tinyurl-preview, url

Filed under: Business, Internet, Video, Web services, Apple

QuickTime vulnerability patched

by Chris Gilmer Jan 30th 2007

Woops, seems like our friends at Apple had left a back door open for hackers to enter through QuickTime. It seems like no matter what companies do, hackers always find a way to penetrate and drop harmful code in. Don't worry, Apple has it fixed now with a patch, but the issue in question stemmed from a concern about a buffer overflow. When QuickTime processes a Real Time Streaming Protocol URL it directs the player to a streaming file, and allows the user to play and pause the file. During the buffer overflow, a hacker could have penetrated through a malicious RTSP URL embedded into a web page that would open a door to run code on the user's machine.

You can grab the patch now at Apple's download page, or through the Apple Software Update service.

Tags: apple, bug, downloads, hacker, itunes, rtsp, streaming, url

The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

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