So I’ve done a little work on qwer.org to make it more useful.

You can still use qwer as a place to swap text and html easily between computers, but now it’s also an ideal tool for making shorter links.

As an example, if you want to share a url with someone over the phone, in an instant messenger away message, an email, or anyplace where a URL with a hundred seemingly random characters would be messy, you can make your own shortcut at qwer.

Say you want to show someone this Calvin and Hobbes book: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0740721356/ref= ase_kevinfox02/107-0203713-9114939 but you’re talking to them on the phone, or the url breaks when it wraps in an email. You can go to http://qwer.org/calvin, paste in the long url, hit return, and now http://qwer.org/calvin will redirect you (and your friend) to the Amazon page.

Don’t give me too much credit. Though I always planned on qwer acting this way, I took some cues from the folks at makeashorterlink.com. I think the qwre solution works better though, for two reasons: First, ‘qwer.org’ is shorter (and faster to type) than ‘makeashorterlink.com’, which is in itself an example of irony. Second, while you can make your own shortcut at ‘qwer.org/matrix‘, the same link at the other site would be ‘makeashorterlink.com/?C38242C2‘. Which would you rather use? Which URL gives you have a hint of where it leads?

In the coming weeks I’ll be putting in more code to deal with recycling links after 7 days or so. I also plan to provide an option for permalinks for registered users (’qwer.org/username/matrix’ for example) and to let users decide whether a given qwer link or page should be editable by the public at large, the way ‘qwer text pages’ work now.

In honor of the new functionality, I’ve officially dropped the [beta] from qwer’s name. Please feel free to use it the next time you need to toss someone a mapquest link over the phone or in email.

Visit qwer now!
(if you want to…)