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Some Assembly Required » Automating TinyURL

Automating TinyURL

I love TinyURL, but being the lazy person that I am, running my browser, navigating to tinyurl.com, entering a url (even using the clipboard), and then pushing a button is just too much work.  So in the spirit of urlrun, I wrote a little utility that automates the interaction with tinyurl.com for me.

There's no UI for my program (command line or otherwise).  Just copy a URL to the clipboard and run my program.  It will read the clipboard, send the URL to tinyurl.com, and copy the results from tinyurl.com back into your clipboard; ready to be pasted into whatever email/document/etc that you were working on when you realized you needed a tiny URL.

I have a shortcut on my desktop that points to my little program, and which I've configured to launch when I press CTRL-SHIFT-T.  So creating/getting a tiny URL for something is as easy as CTRL-C, CTRL-SHIFT-T, CTRL-V.

You can find the source & prebuilt binary here (requires .NET 1.1).

Posted Aug 26 2005, 03:28 PM by mike-woodring

Comments

Mike wrote re: Automating TinyURL
on 08-26-2005 3:37 PM
P.S. I think I'll put a little UI on this utility by way of a simple progress window of some sort just to let you know when the tiny url has been copied to the clipboard. Otherwise there's a race condition: you might try to read the tiny url from the clipboard before I've actually copied it up there :-)

In the meantime, just count to 2 or 3 in your head before hitting ctrl-v :-)
Mike wrote re: Automating TinyURL
on 08-26-2005 4:06 PM
Okay - done. A little yellow box will display indicating work in progress. When it disappears, the clipboard is ready.
Keith Brown wrote re: Automating TinyURL
on 09-01-2005 10:58 AM
Bless you, Mike.

I also use TinyUrl all the time, and I've often thought of automating it this way. Thanks for doing this.

INSTALLED!
Ian Smith wrote re: Automating TinyURL
on 09-06-2005 2:35 PM
There is another service you can use like this. http://xents.com
Sid Steward wrote Throw my hat in the ring
on 09-21-2005 9:04 AM
If you like TinyURL, you might like LookLeap.

* You can use a bookmarklet to easily create LookLeap tiny urls, and

* LookLeap tiny urls include the original host name, e.g.:
http://lookleap.com/maps.google.com/a5

Also, LookLeap does:

* page caching (to stop link rot)
* pdf to html conversion
* tiny url click reporting

I love it, but then again I created it. Details at: www.lookleap.com

Cheers-

Sid
Medardas wrote re: Automating TinyURL
on 02-21-2006 4:32 PM
I enjoyed your tinyURL.exe till 2006.02 and it stopped working for me. I suspect TinyURL.com changed their code or something wrong is with my settings. Thank you!
Mike wrote re: Automating TinyURL
on 02-22-2006 7:20 AM
Thanks - this has been fixed. The the issue and the fix are described here:

http://pluralsight.com/blogs/mike/archive/2006/02/22/18989.aspx
Veer wrote re: Automating TinyURL
on 03-05-2006 12:23 PM
I choose www.cooleon.us over tinyurl b/c cooleon.us gives u the redirection in numbers, which is much easier to remember. Plus that site has other things like file uploads and stuff.
sddd wrote Atomurl.com
on 10-27-2006 6:13 PM
here is an alternative http://www.atomurl.com
Johnny boy wrote re: Automating TinyURL
on 02-03-2007 4:36 AM
I prefer tiddlyurl as it tracks the urls created by me which is much better as my memory suckz. I wish I knew how to program something like this as its a bit of work going to tiddlyurl all the time.
Johnny boy wrote re: Automating TinyURL
on 02-03-2007 4:37 AM
woops I meant http://www.tiddlyurl.com it seems fairly new so hopefully they will add some more features soon.
short url wrote re: Automating TinyURL
on 03-31-2007 2:29 AM
Why not try a new TinyURL alternative xaddr.com? It has a free Windows client that shortens an address copied to the clipboard. It's a new service, so at the moment the urls you get are very short as well.

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