Thanks to Link Consultant-to-the-Stars Eric Ward for telling me about this very cool site MakeaShorterLink.com. Everybody with a publishing site will love this one because it enables you to -- yup -- make shorter links. As you know, many content management systems (such as Vignette) create links to pages that are, well, butt ugly and hideously long. Which means you can't use those links in your email newsletter because if you do a text- newsletter the link will break after about 60 characters in most people's email. Also, if you do an HTML newsletter the link won't work in Hotmail which shows a blank screen for longer links.

(BTW: the whole Hotmail thing is very confusing because a link can work in one person's inbox, but not another's. My tech editor Alexis Gutzman will be writing up a report on this and how to get around it fairly soon.)