Don’t cut that e-mail string

The curse of sending links by e-mail is the tendency to lose the full string of characters in a long Web address.

When e-mailing a long link, try one of several sites that convert long addresses into something shorter.

Such sites include TinyURL.com, notlong.com and metamark.net.

Metamark is very handy and worth bookmarking. You can take a very long URL and assign it a nickname there, say “WeirdAl.”

The site will take the original address and if weirdal.com is available, that’s the address to use in place of the original.