Total Art Soul - for artists

Hopefully this helps with posting teaser links and such to Twitter.

Many times when linking to a gallery or specific image, you end up with a web link that is a mile long. That really cramps the character count limit and seriously limits the amount of descriptive text or trend.tags you can add.

So, what to do and how can that be fixed?

First, copy the link you want to post to Twitter ~ the big, long unwieldy one. Then, open up another window in your browser, and toodle on over to:

tinyurl.com

Paste that long link into the top block, and then hit "Make TinyURL" ~ and Voila! you automagically have a shortened link that accomplishes the same thing with far fewer characters.

Paste that cryptic looking link to your Twitter text, and then add whatever additional descriptive text and tags you need!

To make it easier to post tweets with long links, you could use an application such as tweetdeck to read and write (and filter) your tweets and messages. This will automatically shorten urls (I can't remember offhand which shortener service it uses).

If you use tinyurl, I think adding an = at the end of the url will provide the user with a view of the real url before taking him there. I personally wouldn't click a link that didn't allow this.

I now use the cli.gs shortening service, which shows you the link and a small preview of the page before you click to go forward to the real site. If you (as the person creaing the link) sign up to the service it also provides minimal statistics of the number of people who've visited using the link, and from which country. It can also be used without signing up.

the trouble with anonymous 5 letter URLs is that they could lead anywhere

Interesting ~ never have heard of cli.gs. For stats I generally have Analytics running. I'll have to look into it, thx!

Ooh, really helpful, thanks you two.

I really like TweetDeck, visually it is more pleasing for me!

I found TweetDeck a little memory hungry so I use Hootsuite. I also use SocialOomph which also shortens urls.