Shortening PH Classified links?

[sebhaque]

Wanted to share a few links to cars in the classifieds earlier. Before the new system went live I remembered the link simply being pistonheads.com, forward slash a number. It now seems that the link embodies the search criteria as well as the advert title, which is less than ideal when you're trying to text someone a link. For example, have a look at the one Maserati BiTurbo for sale. It's link is
http://www.pistonheads.com/classifieds/used-cars/m...
...which seems a bit excessive.

Does anybody know an HTML trick or a way of shortening down these silly links without using tinyurl etc? I'm sending these links to a work colleague so it'd be nice if he could actually see what I'm suggesting he buy without resorting to AutoTrader etc.

[MattDell]

We may look into creating a short URL generation. For now, though, you can discard most of the URL and still get to the ad.

For example: http://pistonheads.com/classifieds/x/x/x/x/538086

-Matt

[Stuart]

Until we do that, if you're a google user I tend to find that goo.gl is a really quick way of shortening stuff. Gives you quick and easy tracking on the URL to see if the bugger is actually looking at any of the cars you're sending him too...

[sebhaque]

MattDell said:

We may look into creating a short URL generation. For now, though, you can discard most of the URL and still get to the ad.

For example: http://pistonheads.com/classifieds/x/x/x/x/538086

-Matt

Gotcha, that'll work for now. Cheers for the response!

Stuart said:

Until we do that, if you're a google user I tend to find that goo.gl is a really quick way of shortening stuff. Gives you quick and easy tracking on the URL to see if the bugger is actually looking at any of the cars you're sending him too...

I didn't know you could track the URL... interesting stuff. Ta muchly.