TinyURLs in UIEtips

Ulf wrote about UIEtips, our email newsletter:

First thank you for your newsletter which I really appreciate, but why do you persist on using tinyURLs? That can’t be user-friendly.

Yes, they might be shorter, but they really don’t make sense. It’s like buying a pig in a poke.

TinyURLs are a service provided by the great folks at Gilby Productions. When you give the TinyURL system a long URL, it comes back with an abbreviated one, like this: http://tinyurl.com/cxsml

We use tinyURLs because the larger URLs often are too long for a single line, requiring many of our readers to go through gymnastics when clicking on the links. When the URL is naturally short ( such as http://www.uieroadshow.com), we skip the tinyURL.

We’ve talked about building our own version of TinyURL (after all, it’s just a simple matter of PHP programming) that could use more mnemonic abbreviations, but so far the priority hasn’t popped to the top of our to-do list.

Of course, if we could count on everyone having the same email reader, then we’d have much better luck matching our newsletter to their needs.