Task 18: Zamzar and Tiny URL

Look at this atrocious url.

http://www.thepurplestore.com/cgi-bin/product_detail.cgi?pstore_id=14343&product_line=Kitchen&page=1&column=2&row=2

Whatever am I going to do? I wish there was a way that I could make it into a shorter, more manageable url.

http://tinyurl.com/yhu4p2l

It's a miracle. Now this url is a manageable length!

This very same story is happening to countless multitudes everyday as they discover Tiny URL for the first time.

Tiny URL informed me that the old url was 115 characters long and this new one is only 26 characters long. Isn't that exciting?! Tiny URL is an interesting service. It seems to me that if they charged for their service, then no one would use it. I think the problem they are addressing isn't really as big of a problem as they make it out to be. If I want to put a link to something in an email or blog and it's excessively long, I copy and paste it and hyperlink it to the words "Click Here" or "Link." It's not that difficult to copy and paste and hyperlink--I still had to hyperlink my tiny url anyway. Oh well. All this is not to say that it's not nifty how it works and mysteriously makes shorter URLs--because it is nifty.

Zamzar is pretty neat, except that I wouldn't have known which format to convert this video to if Nancy hadn't mentioned that she converted hers to mpg. Otherwise I would have no clue. It still took me awhile anyway. Thanks person whose name starts with "lyn" for showing me where to find the video url. That was a quite a struggle for me (I keep forgetting to put the u in struggle--I'm too busy concentrating on whether the e or l comes first). I must admit that it even took me awhile the get the video onto my blog--for some reason I was thinking I should be able to copy and paste. But as you can see, I figured it out.



I feel like tasks like this are slowly making me more competent when it comes to helping patrons with computer issues, such as the computer not reading their files, etc.

Okay, That's it for this task. I have already said too much.