- by Marianne Van der Wel

a) Copying and Pasting Links

b) Making Links Shorter

Do you find yourself wanting to share web links you have discovered that point to articles of interest? Often these links are long and cumbersome and simply do not fit into your document or other means of communication.

For example, when compiling the MURAnews, we often want to show links that are very long yet must fit on a single printed line. One way is to reduce the font size so much that the links are hard to read without a magnifying glass.

You may have the same issue if you use Twitter to share a web page with your friends and colleagues. With Twitter’s limit of 140 characters including blanks, long web addresses are not feasible. The solution?  Use TinyURL. On this web site, you can enter a very long link such as https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/04/29/six-maps-that-will-make-you-rethink-the-world

TinyURL will generate a shorter link to the same web page such as http://tinyurl.com/y8o6vgh9, that will never expire.

c) Twitter: Useful for Sharing Links

• You do NOT need an account to read a Twitter page: Try  http://twitter.com/cbc to read CBC news articles
• Twitter provides a nice way of pointing to a variety of web sites and blogs that you may wish to share.
  
• Create a Twitter account