Writers: How to Get tiny

Are you ever embarrassed to admit you don't know something which you imagine must be incredibly obvious to everyone else? And then, when you do say so out loud, instead of getting eye-rolls, you hear a resounding and reassuring chorus of, "Oh I never knew that either"?

In that spirit, I make my confession. I never knew that there was a free web tool to compress those horribly long URLS into those wildly efficient and mysterious ones that begin "tinyurl". Then a few days ago, I admitted as much to a colleague, who I was sure would be appalled at my ignorance. Instead, she simply told me, in one easy step, how it's done -- no eye-rolling. Since then, I have mentioned this to at least a dozen other folks, nearly all of whom said, "Oh, how do you do that?"

So here's how: copy and paste the annoyingly long URL into the little box over at tiny.cc, click on the Compress button, and viola, a new URL appears, beginning with "tinyurl" and -- here's the really nifty part -- it's already been placed in your clipboard so that you can then immediately return to whatever it is you were writing and insert the new, shorter (tiny) URL.

I don't really know or for that matter care why this freebie feature exists - there's no obvious advertising supporting it. And maybe some of you are doing the eye-roll right about now. That's OK. I know plenty of folks aren't, so this is for them. You're welcome.