XR.com and paying it forward

Nov 25, 2008- Permalink

Sometimes things seem to happen by chance and other times it appears that destiny has a hand in the opportunities that come our way. As I wrote the other day, I lost a dear friend and fellow celebrity photographer, David Morgan, to a heart condition. His partner Di has asked that instead of flowers, his friends should make donations to the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute in Australia.

I’m already making a donation, but then I saw a chance to potentially expand upon my donation multiple times. Dot com mogul and blogger John Chow recently blogged about a new tiny url service called xr.com that helps turn long urls into, well, tiny ones.

What does this have to do with the charity? Well, when John Chow wrote about the xr.com service, the site’s owner, Richard Lau sent him a $5,000 thank you. John paid that kindness forward by donating it to the Union Gospel Mission’s Christmas Drive. Richard and John then came up with a new contest where a review of xr.com could earn a blogger $5,000 for the charity of their choice (in my case the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute) and $1000 to use as they please, though I’d just use it for another donation to the heart research. I thought for a while before entering this contest. Would it seem crass to write a review in this situation? But then I thought that a $6000 donation is a $6000 donation and I don’t care if I have to do cartwheels in a Santa suit to earn it. If I win, that’s $6000 going to help heart research and potentially finding the cures and causes of a disease that takes so many people away from their loved ones too early.

What’s the purpose of xr.com’s service? I often find that long urls (especially from newspaper sites) will sometimes break in people’s email software and then they write back and say, “That link you sent me didn’t work!” Rather than going through the effort of cutting and pasting to fix the url, I like to use a tiny url service like xr.com to send a much shorter url. For example, if I want to send a page from my own site, a photo of Tilda Swinton, John Malkovich and Brad Pitt at the Burn After Reading premiere in Toronto, I can send the real url https://www.digitalhit.com/galleries/31/457/27 or the tiny url, which is https://xr.com/jsn. Suddenly 45 characters of url becomes only 10 characters. That’s great for tossing into an email and I’m sure that xr.com will be a frequent stop for me.

So there you have it. A great new tiny url service called xr.com and a potentially superb way to further assist a charitable cause that’s close to my heart.