LinkFrog

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Help Using LinkFrog

Go to the LinkFrog glossary for definitions of many of the words and phrases found here and elsewhere on this site. There is also a page for Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs), addressing many of the concerns and problems people have. And if you wish to get in touch with us, use the contact form on our contact page.

Making surfing easier

URLs to sites on the web can easily become impossibly long. URLs several hundred characters long are not uncommon, and make sharing links and information with others extremely difficult. Moreover, many e-mail and news services limit the length of a given line, for instance, breaking up long links and making them unusable. Even relatively short links are extremely difficult to remember, difficult to write down, and easily mistyped.

LinkFrog to the rescue! LinkFrog is a free service for shortening URLs, turning long, unwieldy ones into manageable ones. The length reduction is often dramatic, the total number of characters often being reduced 90% or more. Moreover, it's quick and easy.

You can use the shortened links wherever you used the original link. Send it via e-mail, post it in newsgroups, or share it word-of-mouth. LinkFrog automatically associates the original URL with a short, random series of mnemonics. You may also provide a mnemonic, thereby associating the link to shorten with a memorable and appropriate URL.

The best way to describe what LinkFrog does is with an example. Say, as so often happens, you were using Google's image search to look for Milli Vanilli concert shots, and came across one so totally tubular that you had to send it to your best friend Reginald. Links so found can be breathtakingly long:

http://example.com

304 characters! No problemo, cut-and-paste works great. So you send Reggie the link via e-mail, basta.

Problem is, Reginald's e-mail program doesn't like long lines, and breaks up the link in 60 character bites. Reg opens his e-mail to see this:

Now you have a dead link, and Reggie's terminally bummed!

LinkFrog is there for you

Instead of pasting the link in an e-mail, you had only to paste it into the LinkFrog entry form and click "Submit." Immediately you are presented with a small, user-friendly link for all your e-mail needs, something like http://linkfrog.net/1234. It's short enough to write down, clear enough to exchange word-of-mouth. And making such links doesn't even hurt too much!

You can also decide how the final link should look, by choosing the mnemonic associated with it. Just enter a string of characters between four and twenty characters long in the mnemonic Input box. If you wanted to be a bit more daring, you could have entered your own mnemonic to append to the LinkFrog address, like this : http://linkfrog.net/milliVanilli4Ever.

End of the Lesson! Try it yourself, don't cost a thing. Simply cut-and-paste the link above into the box below (drag-and-drop also works with most browsers). Click the "Submit" button, and you get your new link right away. If you are feeling particularly daring, enter something in the mnemonic field. (And sorry, but http://linkfrog.net/milliVanilli4Ever is really already taken.)

Problem is, Reginald's e-mail program doesn't like long lines, and breaks up the link in 60 character bites. Reg opens his e-mail to see this:

Use of this service indicates your agreement with the terms and conditions governing it. Please read and understand them before continuing. They were last updated on November 8th, 2005.

A couple notes about how LinkFrog works

The assigned mnemonic is merely the next four-character string of alpha-numeric digits, incremented each time someone submits a link. This allows for over 1.5 million distinct links. (Links are case-insensitive.) At some point, we will have to add a fifth digit, but for four works just fine.

You can also create your own mnemonic, within certain limitations. For starters, must be at least four characters long, and no longer than 20 characters. Also, all mnemonics may only contain alpha-numeric characters (a-z, 0-9), minus-signs (-), and underscores (_). This means that it cannot contain white spaces, slashes, at signs (@) or most other "special" characters.

Also, links submitted to LinkFrog must be syntactically valid. Consider the following URL:

http://www.example.com/someFile.htm?keys=values

It consists of four primary parts, three of which are mandatory. URLs always start with the first mandatory section, known as the scheme. In the given example, the scheme is http://, the most common scheme around. LinkFrog allows most of the popular schemes, including http://, https://, ftp://, and many lesser-known ones, like ldap:// and gopher://. The mailto: scheme is not supported by LinkFrog. If you do not enter a scheme when shortening a link, LinkFrog assumes the most common: http://.

The second mandatory part of a URL is the base address, or authority. It tells your web browser where on earth (literally) the website is located. Here, the authority is www.example.com, and does not provide any indication of where the site may be. To find that out, your web browser needs to ask an online service responsible for maintaining the physical locations of web-servers.

The part of the URL between the authority and the question mark (here, /someFile.htm is the location on the web-server of the actual file. This path implies that the online file sought is named "someFile.htm," and is located in the web-server's root directory. Officially, the path is a mandatory part of any URL. Most web-servers, however, have well-defined default behavior for when a URL is missing its path, for instance simply checking if there is a file named "index.html" in the root directory.

Everything following the question mark is called the query, and is optional. It provides information destined for the web-page, and consists of key/value pairs separated by ampersands (&).

Questions? Comments? We'd love to here from you! Simply fill out and send the form below. You can also go to our glossary for more detailed descriptions of URLs and their component parts.