Email address shortening on April fools day
The first of April is commonly called April fools day. But, is Sandra Bullock really filing for divorce? Who knows. And really, that is not our subject here today.
How often have you needed to shorten a url? At this point, it seems that there is no shortage of url shortening services. There is tinyurl, bitly, goo.gl, isgd, doiop, dwarfurl, ow.ly, memurl, and the list seems to go on forever (except for readthisurl, which does not seem to exist anymore).
I would love to say that each service has something unique to offer, but the differences seem to be really small. memurl does aim to make shortened urls pronounceable, and there are some differences in performance, but still, some people never seem to be satisfied. Since it is the thought that counts, we won’t let any of this worry us here today.
Actually, we won’t let this worry us as url shortening is not the subject of this post. This is not a joke; the shortening of email addresses is our focus here today. Have you ever wanted this? I noticed during a quick Google search that Jake did on 01/05/10. Well Jake, it seems that the nice people at scr.im heard of your desire and have come forth with help.
This could be useful if you want to post your email address in a public place but don’t want a zillion emails from automated evil (e.g., spam). Of course, manual evil will still be able to get to you, but sometimes that is OK. Some emails you receive may be from real sick people, but at least they are real people. I have known automated evil to happen to users of twitter on occasion. What can this website do to help?
Well, scr.im. is not only a simple solution, but it has a nice picture of a ladybug on its website.
So, you just enter your email address, enter your preferred url, and click the button. I chose “icebb” as the end of my url, so it is “http://scr.im/icebb.” As you can see below, the wonderful people at scr.im also made suggestions for ways to use my new email address pointer (or whatever you want to call this).
If I do as instructed, another person who finds my scrim can click on it and will be taken to the web page shown below.
Once you have clicked on the appropriate button above, you will be taken to the page shown below which gives my true email address.
But, you ask, how does this work in reality? To test this new way of leaving my email address, I visited a blog written by a guy from Canada who likes to point out that he is from Canada (I enjoyed Niagara Falls when I was a kid, by the way, so thanks Canada!).
Anyway, the blogger, Mark Evans writes interesting techy stuff and I decided to test this in a post he had written about changing his comment system. Not quite a perfect match for this, but I thought it was close enough.
I entered a comment along with both of the formats given by scr.im for HTML and forums. The results were not good as this did not work with these in the text box. Also, the url to get the email address did not validate when entered in the email address box. But, all is not lost. There is always Twitter.
OK, so this tool may not be ground braking, but it may prove to have some real world uses for many users in the future. It is a great tool. I hope your April Fools Day is fun and that it does not last all year.
Have a good day!
- Mark
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