Shorten URLs From Address Bar, Firefox or Opera

Shortening URLs is a common thing many of us do when we want to share long links as short URLs via email, instant messenger and so on.

In Firefox and Opera you can use the address bar to get the dirty work done easy. For this example I’ll use http://is.gd, a popular URL shortening service.

Firefox

1. Go to http://is.gd

2. Right-click inside the field. From the menu that appears, choose Add a keyword for this search, like this:

3. Title it as is.gd and use keyword is, like this:

..then click the Save button.

4. Load up a web page that has a long URL. This is easily found at sites like www.arstechnica.com. Click any home page article so you see the long URL in your address bar. It will look something like this:

5. Click inside the address bar, then press Home on your keyboard (the key next to PgUp). After that, press the spacebar once and put the word is in front of the long link. When done you should have this:

6. Press Enter. You should see something like this happen:

Now you have a shortened URL ready to share.

Opera 10.50

This is very similar to the Firefox way of doing it.

I’ll use a different URL shortening service for this example.

1. Go to http://ow.ly

2. Right-click in the Shorten URL field and select Create search, like this:

3. On the next screen, simply enter a keyword of owl to make it simple, like this:

..and then click OK.

Follow the same instructions on step 4,5 and 6 for Firefox above, except replace is with owl and you’ll get the same result.

Remember that you can use any keyword you want. Instead of owl you could use a single letter O, or maybe the word short, or anything you like. Use whatever works best for you.