eGovernment Resource Centre - Victoria, Australia

Victorian
Government
Contact Centre
1300 366 356

Main Menu

Categories, RSS and More

Main Categories

Shorten URL

Please enter the URL that you'd like to shorten or click here to shorten current:


What's this? loading...

Rate this Site

Thanks for visiting. To help us help you find what you need please take our 1 minute Visitor Survey.

Members Forum

The Forum is the place for members to post their opinions and exchange ideas.

Help - URL shortener for Victorian Government

The Victorian Government has released a URL shortener for vic.gov.au domains.

Screen shot of the go Shorten URL application

The GO shorten URL application is located in the left hand navigation pane of this website

The increasing popularity of the microblogging site Twitter, with its 140 character limit on messages, has made commercial link-shortening services like bit.ly and tinyurl important cogs in the social media community.

Link-shortening applications take existing web addresses and shrink them to fit into short messages that can be read via Twitter or on a smart phone. Since traditional URLs often can be extremely long (and especially in Victorian Government), link-shorteners create short Web addresses that point at the same piece of content.

The US Government recently released go.USA.gov to provide this same service.

There has been demand from across government for a dedicated Victorian Government URL shortening service.

Some government departments ban access to some external URL shortening services.

Victorian Government is currently using a wide variety of external URL shortening services which do not have the authenticity of government attached to them.

Providing a URL shortening service for the Victorian Government will enable the government to be able to keep its data authenticity while ensuring that data reaches a wider audience.

How to use the service

Please follow the steps below to generate short URL:

  • Go to http://www.egov.vic.gov.au/
  • Enter the full URL that you would like to shorten into SHORTEN URL box.

    • Screen shot of the go Shorten URL application

  • Click on the "Shorten It" button.
  • Your short URL will be highlighted for you. You can copy the short URL to use it wherever you want.

Restrictions

Currently the service only generates short URLs for .vic.gov.au domains.

FAQs

Q - Is there a statistics page for my short URL?

A - Not at this point - this is on our list of things to do

Q - How can I see the list of most used or most recent short URLs?

A - Not at this time

Q - I want to shorten an URL but it said that the source domain is not allowed, why is that?

A - We have restricted this to vic.gov.au at this point in time. This is representing Victorian Government.

Q - I like this service and would like to offer it on my website, Is there an API?

A - Yes - coming soon - currently in development - watch this space

Q - My question is not listed here, who should I contact?

A - See contact information below.

Feedback on how we can improve this service

Please provide us with your feedback on how we can improve this service.

Bookmark and Share

Added: 19 October 2010 Page views: 71,004 Rating: 2 Votes: 3
Review and rate
Last updated: 29 October 2010

Reviews (1)

  • Review By: Guest   [05/11/2010]
    This shortening service is unfortunately not short enough. And as a marketing practitioner, i really need stats functionality to measure the effectiveness of my links...