TinyURL

Ya it does seem like I've been posting a lot but don't worry it will die down real fast. This one is a little off topic but I don't care. One of my responsibilities at work is to help add and modify our KB (Knowledge Base). this contains lots of information on our clients and how to quickly resolve issues that are specific to them. Our KB is done in a Wiki just like www.wikipedia.org/ but you can only access it on our network.

If you have edited a Wiki before you'll know that it doesn't use regular HTML like most websites do. I had to create a link in the Wiki that points to a file shared on a server like this: "\\servername\foldername\file.name" so little quick modification I changed it to look like this so it's recognized by a web browser: "file://servername/foldername/file.name" I could plop that into IE and it works perfectly but the Wiki still didn't know what to do with it. A few hours of Google searching later I was reading a forum on this problem and found my answer. Some one in one of the posts said the word "tiny" not referring to TinyURL but it made me think: "Hey that just might work!" You can take a look at www.tinyurl.com to see exactly how it works but basically it takes a long URL like this: "http://www.example.com/this/isnt/a/real/url/example.html" and turns it into something like this: "http://www.tinyurl.com/example"

what I did was put "file://servername/foldername/file.name" and it gave me "http://tinyurl.com/filename" and the Wiki like that just fine. so I've been super happy with TinyURL lately.