Is there a way of shortening a link like the following?

If I understand your question, check out tinyurl.com

http://tinyurl.com/

Click on this: http://tinyurl.com/84lhusm

@gailcalled thanks that was fast. I will report back.

I use TinyURL all the time, so I strongly second that recommendation.

FWIW, there are a bunch of URL-shortening services, of which TinyURL is only one. There is also xrl.com, but I prefer bit.ly.

I prefer to use goo.gl. If you’re signed in to google, you can track how many people click the link, what country they’re from, what browser they use, etc. It’s pretty interesting.

There’s tinyurl, but I really don’t like the existence of tinyurl because too many scammers use it to hide malicious sites behind.

Okay thanks everyone!
Another little thing, is there anthing I can do to make it stay the way it was while I was composing the question in the detail box, all the letters were visible (they were in 6 lines) instead of becoming the way you see it now, it went beyond the right margins. I mean if I were in a rush to do the tinyurl thing.

you’re talking about here on Fluther specifically? No. That’s a design decision (ie, bug) by the developers of this website. It’d be up to them to fix how long links are displayed.

@MrItty thanks. I meant anywhere by the way, not just in Fluther.

The same answer applies. The way any text – link or otherwise – is displayed on a website after someone posts it depends entirely on the developer of that website.

What does the 84lhusm represent? I was expecting to see “tiny.url.com/why is the skyblue”?

@flo it’s just a code. It’s the short name tinyurl ties to the long url. Using all the digits and all the letters, that’s 36 different characters. With 7 different slots for those characters, Tinyurl could store up to 36^7 = 78,364,164,096 different websites. Even more if they used punctuation marks and/or increased the length of the code.

The point of the service is to make a URL short, not easy to remember. (Though some shortening services, such as bit.ly, do enable you to customize your shortcode, so you could choose your own (assuming it hasn’t already been used)).

@MrItty thanks for that.