ItsGeekToMe.co

Q: HELLO, I READ YOUR NOTE TO SOME ONE WHO, LIKE ME WANTED TO DOWNLOAD ‘OUTLOOK EXPRESS’ TO A WINDOWS 7 SYSTEM. YOU GAVE tinyurl.com/2ahcq7z AS THE ADDRESS TO GO TO FOR HELP. TRIED & TRIED, JUST GET  (SOME RATHER SUGGESTIVE-YUCK!)  STRANGE SITES.

THEN HOW CAN I TRANSFER JUST MY ADDRESS-BOOK TO THIS NEW SYSTEM, PLEASE? THE ONE ON ‘WINDOWS LIVE’ IS A VERY OLD EDITION, MISSING LOTS OF ENTRIES-GO FIGURE!  BE GLAD OF ANY HELP, I’M LOST AND AM NO STARNGER TO COMPUTER-ING!

– Vicki L.
Fort Walton Beach, Fla

A: Vicki, the first help I’m going to offer to you is to say that modern netiquette (that’s shorthand for “Internet etiquette”) says that words typed in ALL CAPS are considered shouting.  So unless you intended to scream your entire e-mail at me, how about turning off the caps lock?  As far as the URL, I’m sorry that you ended up looking at suggestive sites, but I assure you, the link is absolutely correct.  There is an inherent problem with publishing URLs in the newspaper.  URLs can be pretty long, and newspaper columns are relatively short.  When a word (including part of a URL) breaks across lines on a newspaper page, typically a hyphen gets inserted, and I have no control over this.  If the reader types that hyphen when entering the link in a browser, they’ll never reach the intended site.  Worse yet, some links are nothing more than 60 or 80 characters of computer-generated gibberish that was never intended for human fingers to have to type.  This kind of URL is very difficult to manually enter without error.  So, when I need to publish a link in the column, I usually use the web service TinyURL, which allows me to shorten any link to a size that is easy to type, and won’t break across lines.  TinyURL takes advantage of what’s referred to as a “redirect”.  It looks up in its database the short URL that you provide, retrieves the long URL that I provided, and literally redirects your browser to the intended site.  I test each and every link that I publish to ensure they all do what they’re supposed to do – after all, this is a family-friendly column!   So, if you’re winding up somewhere else, you very likely have a piece of malware on your computer that is intercepting the redirect, and re-redirecting you elsewhere.  TinyURL.com offers a way for you to preview the site to which you are going to be redirected before you are taken there.  That way you can compare the site to which you’re redirected to the preview, and you’ll know immediately if you were hijacked.  Go to tinyurl.com/preview.php to enable this feature.