Short-Cut, Not Short Circuit.

Continuing with my theme of facilitating short-cuts as a route to better usability and improved customer experience, it's crucial to ensure that the short-cut in question is actually a short-cut for your users.

Tinyurl.com is a very useful facility that reduces unwieldy url's to a manageable length. That is great when you're sending them in SMS form, but it doesn't facilitate comprehension as you can see here.

The predominance of emboldened tiny urls in an article about podcasts is certainly a short-cut for the techie writer in terms of printspace. However, from the reader's perspective, having one's scanning eyes drawn to indecipherable urls does nothing positive.

The only short-cut this facilitates is that of the reader to the next article.

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