Frequently Asked Questions
Here are some of the most frequently asked questions I get. If these answers aren't clear, or if your question isn't on this page, contact me through the contact form.
Why should I use this site and tools?
The URL shortener will save you characters in your social networking sites, more than any other shortener out there - I've reduced URL's to six characters. The text reduction tools will reduce legitimate text without shorthand, leet-speak or other tricks. The other tools are just for fun, use them to trip out or annoy your friends.
Why do I see an empty box or square like ⎕ ?
These tools use special characters that are available on every computer. Even though every computer will understand the character, it may not have a proper font to display it, in which case you'll see a ⎕ character that looks like an empty box.
This is completely fine and expected for the URL Shortening service, and even though you'll see many URL's that end in the ⎕ empty square character, they'll all have different meaning to the computer.
However, if you see an empty square in the other tools on this site then I'd like to know about it, please contact me with the input you used and tell me which character was converted to the ⎕ empty square.
Will other people be able to read my shortened URL's and text?
The URL's here will be fine everywhere, even if people just see boxes they'll work as expected. As far as the text reduction tool, the odds are that if you can read it, other people will be able to also. I am also going through the characters that get generated to remove ones that commonly don't show up.
What's with the crazy looking URL's like http://❽.ws/❤ ?
The URL's here are made of special characters that you can't easily type in. However, all computers understand these characters, and will process the URL's with no problem.
Why doesn't my shortened URL work?
The site's are in BETA mode right now, and it looks like a very small percentage of URL's (e.g. less than 1%) aren't working properly. I'm investigating the issue and plan to fix it. In the meantime, just generate a new URL!
Why does the short URL go to http://xn-gfi.ws ?
The domain I use for URL's is http://❽.ws which is technically called an Internationalized Domain Name. It's made up of special characters - like the one that looks like an eight-ball, or a black circle with a white number 8 insside. Under the covers though, these specialcharacters all have to resolve, or get mapped, to characters from the Latin alphabet, the letters A-Z and the numbers 0-9. Which is why ❽.ws maps to xn-gfi.ws. However, the mapping happens after the link is clicked, so you still get the benefit of the shortest URL possible! Just 6 characters.