Tiny URLs, Xelerus mods and my new signature

[ThePrivateer]

So, I now have a rather large amount of mods I wanted to display all of them in my signature.

Long ago, I learnt about URL compressions, like tiny.cc, tinyURL.com and I have seen bit.ly and even j.mp. All of these came about because of the emergin 140/255 character technologies that mean you cannot have long URLs chewing up the amount of characters you can post in places like IRC, Twitter and in forums signatures.

Because of the way bbcode works, it works on the chars typed into the box of your signature, even though the viewers never see that.

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[url=http://www.google.com]Google![/url]

Simply becomes : Google!. Meaning that signatures chew up lots of characters for minimal result. Tiny URLs fix this problem by doing something like this (not a real address)

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[url=http://tiny.cc/XxXxX]Here![/url]

In larger links, this saves a huge amount of space, so is good for listing lots of URLs. Unfortunately, the forums only allow a maximum of 5 URLs in a signature and I was touching the upper limits of the cap anyway, so I came up with an idea

I went to Xelerus and performed a search to display all of my (ThePrivateer) mods, and list them by name, not category. The resulting url looked like this:

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http://xelerus.de/index.php?s=mod_search&c=&mname=&aname=ThePrivateer&sorta=2&sortb=1

Not pretty to put in a signature. So i went to tiny.cc, and used a function that allowed for a custom URL. I ended up with this:
http://tiny.cc/theprivateermods

Brilliant! Now with one link and a compartively tiny amount of characters, I can take people directly to my own page of Xelerus listings and am now freed up to have more text and more URls in my signature.


I just wanted to share with you my new trick! Some of you may know this, and some may just be learning. I suggest that large modders do the same, so you can link people to all you mods and watch your download counter go up!

PS. IMO, compression links are a bit of a worry. For one thing, they are 'blind' - clicking on a tiny url means you have no idea where you are being taken, so please provide as much information before posting the link so people know where they are being directed. In this age of potential internet threats, these blind links could cause trouble and I often am worried about using them, so that's why I have (in my signature), told users that the link is "for Xelerus".

[Ttech]

There are numerous sites for url shorting. My favorites are is.gd (shortest url almost) and there is bit.ly. We use them quite often on IRC because of the limit of the topic message.

[alterecco]

bit.ly also owns the j.mp that ThePrivateer posted above. They are interchangable.