Key Length

As of October 2006 TinyURL have moved on to 6-character keys, so now you have the choice between 5 or 6. The rest is as below.

Update to the below. As of March 2005 I've decided that the 5-character key space is now well enough populated to make that the default. So it is!

The TinyURL algorithm seems to have recently (as of December 2003) run out of 4-character long aliases (eg 2gh8, y2pp etc) and started allocating 5-character long ones. However contrary to what I believed it doesn't seem to use a direct sequential allocation, so until a sizeable number of keys have been allocated the Roulette generates lots of keys that are "missing" in the TinyURL database.

I have tried to cater for this to a degree by limiting the first character of the 5-character long keys to those that I know are in use but there are still plenty of misses. Select the 5-character long key generation if you really don't want to miss any potential TinyURL links, but be prepared to hit a lot of "Unable to find site's URL" errors. It's up to you!

Note that whichever option you choose, you will still get 4-character long links being generated (and 3- and 2- and even (very occasionally) 1-character long links). The setting referred to above merely controls whether or not the script will generate any 5-character long links.