About Tharp Me!
Tharp Me! is yet another of the seemingly millions of URL shorteners on the web. The source was originally developed by Jeremy Tharp in 2009, for the URL Shortener Abbreviate Me!. It has been ported to facilitate the rapid deployment of a URL shortener on any domain. It is designed to be free to use, and it has stats, an API, and a bookmarklet.
So what are benefits of this one over say another URL shortener?
- Very short domain name (http://tharp.me/ = 16 character base URL)!
- All URLs within the first 916,132,832 will be 21 characters or less (We use uppercase and lowercase letters as well as numbers in our hash, and 62*62*62*62*62 = 916,132,832)
- Shorten http:// URLs as well as https:// and ftp://
- We clone the <title> tag of destination URLs in order to maintain semantic relevance, mainly for search spiders that might not automatically follow the 301 redirect.
- We verify that all URLs entered are real as to reduce the junk links in the database.
Why use a URL shortener at all? URL shorteners have become popular because of text messaging and sites like Twitter, where people can benefit from a much shorter URL. One of the best reasons, however, is to track stats when you post a link in your blog or on your website so that you can track clicks!
There are many URL shorteners to choose from, and many offer similar perks. The original http://abv8.me/ was just for fun, so we just wanted to share it with the world.
This URL shortener will only shorten URLs on the following domains:
- jeremytharp.com