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Some sites you may have needed and not known it!

Some email clients are set to wordwrap long text, including urls, and then the next email client tries to make the first line of the url "hot", and ignore the rest of the url, making it a useless link. USE TINYURL.COM !!!

I put a little html doc on my desktop to call up tinyurl.com. Here's the doc:

<html><head>
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Pragma" CONTENT="no-cache">
<META http-equiv="refresh" content="0;URL=http://tinyurl.com">
</head></html>
Just copy/paste that html to a desktop file, called tinyurl.html , for instance. When you click on it, it will open your browser, and tell it to go to that site.

You paste the long url at the tinyurl.com site where it says to paste the long url there, and submit, and it generates a short url that points to the same place as your long url. And it's free. You use the short url in the email, because it's so short, it's extremely unlikely to wordwrap. Irc is the same way, some urls these days, like for social sites, have extremely long urls, over 500 characters, that don't fit even irc lines!

Using the same trick, this is a quickey way to get weather on your desktop, but insert your own zip code where you see 35201 !

<html><head>
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Pragma" CONTENT="no-cache">
<META http-equiv="refresh" content="0;URL=http://www.wunderground.com/cgi-bin/findweather/getForecast?query=35201">
</head></html>
Just copy/paste that html to a desktop file, called myweather.html , for instance. When you click on it, it will open your browser, and tell it to go to that site.

Sometimes, i need to paste a long bit of code for several people to look at simultaneously, or a pic or two, and i don't feel energetic enough to post it to my own site. Or perhaps you have the same needs, to share a pic to a large audience, and you have no website. Here's the solution:


<html><head><title>
Image and text paste sites
</title></head><body><center><p><p>
<h1>Text sites:</h1><p>
<a href="http://euphoria.pastebin.com/">http://pastebin.com/</a><p>
<a href="http://euphoria.pastey.net/">http://pastey.net/</a><p>
<p>
<h1>Image sites:</h1><p>
<a href="http://imgbin.org/">http://imgbin.org/</a><p>
<a href="http://imagebin.org/">http://imagebin.org/</a><p>
<a href="http://imageshack.us">http://imageshack.us</a><p>
</center></body></html>

I tend to not like inappropriate ads in webpages. Most of these are served up from a collection of certain servers. You can block these sites in windows with the "hosts" file. The file has no extension like .bat or .txt , it's just "hosts". To call it up as needed, rather than put a windows shortcut on the desktop, i put this batch file on the desktop. It calls my favorite text editor, and tells it to open the hosts file. I can then add a site, or comment out a site.

"C:\Program Files\TextPad 4\TEXTPAD.EXE" C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
Since this is a "batch file", it is executeable, and must be given a .bat extension, i call mine hosts.bat . You can usually call up your favorite editor the same way. Your hosts file may be in a different location. I actually found three hosts files, and determined which one was active in windows simply by adding a site to block, and seeing if i could get to it.