For years I’ve used Tinyurl.com to take a long ugly url and make it sendable through email. Long emails tend to get cut in two which needs a bit of cutting and pasting to restore.
Now though someone has come up with an alternative, though more I suspect because it’s search engine friendly. Just paste the link, add a title which is then transmogrified into a friendly URL. Quite neat.
For example I was at The Science Museum in London yesterday. The Google maps link to this location is http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&time=&date=&ttype=&q=
science+museum&sll=54.162434,-3.647461&sspn=17.369149,28.78418&ie=UTF8&
ll=51.497262,-0.174247&spn=0.002248,0.003514&t=h&z=18&om=1
While the decenturl.com version is http://decenturl.com/maps.google/science-museum-on-google-maps
Of course if you want a bit of fun, why not try hugeurl.com!!!
Popularity: 6% [?]
The UK’s cradle to grave welfare system while not perhaps the most generous in the world is not bad- in theory no one should ever starve.
But a lot of benefits that people are entitled to go uncollected because the system isn’t so easy to work with. This site provides a way for you to see if you are entitled to anything and if so how much. It doesn’t get much easier than this. If you find yourself in need then this is a good starting point to see if you are indeed entitled to anything, and the site is totally free.
Popularity: 6% [?]
This does what is says it does. It looks up the meanings of word very quickly. It also includes synonyms where relevant and keeps a history list of words you’ve looked up on the right of the screen.
Calling it Ninja (ie for speed) is a bit of a misnomer. Maybe they see it as a killer of other dictionary lookup sites! But it is fast and easy to use. If you use words, worth a look…
Popularity: 4% [?]
It will probably never win any awards for visual appearences but then with this type of site that isn’t quite so important.
My grandfather used to have a workshop full of mysterious tools- I could spend hours looking at them wondering what they were. Mind you I was only 8 years old. But I did manage to take apart a few clocks and put them back together with one or two bits left over. That was ok until I started on the working clocks.
If you are into old tools, this is a tremendous site. Lathes, planes, old companies, history, people and useful links. There is a lot here- at least 700+ pages according to google.
Popularity: 6% [?]