Multi-Tab URL Shortening
Just to begin, I don’t have the answer to this question. If anything it was more an idea I had a while ago when I started to use services like TinyURL more and more. And since the explosion of use of Twitter, many people rely on these shortening service to share information or provide trackbacks to main articles.
But it has been bugging me for a while why there is no service that can take multiple tabbed webpages, compress them down into a single short URL, then spit the original tabs on the other end? It’s safe to say that every modern browser these days supports tabs. Heck, most mobile version for PDA’s, phones etc. have this same functionality. But if I want to share a browser session with someone, I’m unable to do this. Why?
FireFox & Internet Explorer both allow you to set multiple tabs up as your homepage through pretty much the same standard of:
My Homepage: www.cannongod.tumblr.com | www.google.com
Using this vertical bar will tell these browsers how to open up each web address in separate tabs. Unfortunately this is where the limitation lies - you choose to allow those pages to open, so the browser responds accordingly. But with firewall and limited virus protection for your browser, clicking a link that tries to equivalently ‘reprogramme’ the browser won’t be permitted (and rightly so).
However, knowing this I still wanted to experiment with the range of information I could lockup inside a tinyURL. Unfortunately entering the above information won’t work, but I’m pretty sure I could shorten down JavaScript and get it to activate throught the link. Maybe with some modification a JavaScript file could be written that take’s each weblink and tinyURL’s it all down. Thus once clicked it runs and proceeds to open each in their own tab. Not entirely sure if that’s entirely secure and make the browser throw a wobbly, but definitely an area of investigation. All I know is that right now I can write something like:
Zip this up into a TinyURL and when you click on http://tinyurl.com/595up2 it should at least list each link you wanted to share. The browser won’t like it, but it will at least unzip each link into the address bar for you to cut and paste into separate tabs as you wish.
