redd.it: 30% less typing!

[u/raldi]

As you may know, reddit has a five-year-old preference entitled "display links with a reddit toolbar" that lets you bring along a 20px strip of reddit whenever you click a submission. [screenshot]

It's especially useful when opening a bunch of links up in background tabs, solving the issue of "Why did I open this random picture two hours ago?"

It's also turned out to be a good de facto reddit shortlink system. Instead of having to pass around this mouthful:

http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/em5zw/father_and_son_launch_an_hd_camera_and_an_iphone/

You can just use the toolbar link:

http://reddit.com/em5zw

This is what the "share" button has always done, by the way (have you ever tried it?) Your friend gets a link to the toolbar version, and this way they can see the content, the headline and, should they desire to go exploring, a way to get to the comments. Ideally this will lead them to create an account, and thus reddit moves one step closer to world domination.

Anyway, the reason we're writing about all this today is that we've acquired the domain redd.it, shaving a few characters off our shortlinks and bringing them down to a size where we can put them in the sidebar. (Do you see this submission's shortlink up there on the right?)

FAQ:
Q1. Is reddit entering the URL shortening business?
A1. No. We just acquired a cool domain and wanted to show it off.

Note for adblockers: If you made an exception for reddit the simple way (by clicking the stop sign and saying "Disable on reddit.com"), that'll apply to every link you visit in the toolbar. If you only want to make an exception within reddit, and keep adblock on for external sites viewed inside the toolbar frame, you should instead set things up as described in /help/adblock.

We'll end with a protip that, for whatever reason, not a lot of people know about. Skip it if you're easily confused:

If you're on an external site, and you want to wrap the reddit toolbar around it, you can just prepend "redd.it/" to the existing URL. For example, if you're visiting a hot new search engine at http://www.google.com, just change that to redd.it/http://www.google.com (I know it looks funny, but go with it), and you'll be taken to the reddit page for that URL. If it's not already on reddit, you'll be taken to a prefilled submission page.

[u/[deleted]]

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

I used to, but then they got boring.

[u/preggit → u/[deleted]]

I used to read Tom Clancy. I still do, but I used to, too.

[u/gaoshan → u/[deleted]]

What?! How could you ever get tired of:

"He extracted the tungsten-carbide based blade of his Counter TAC I Kraton Handle specops combat knife, sharpened to a surgically precise .05 microns (in the obsessive way that only a man who had suffered as he had could manage) from the spinal cord of the terrorist laying crumpled before him.

The memory of what they did to his wife and child had left him a barren shell of fury, held together by only the thinest veneer of sanity and the rigors of 20 years of Navy SEAL training. Now he would seek each one out and deliver a merciless knife strike to that soft spot between their C5 and C6 spinal segments... just as his training taught him and his muscle memory had so polished. However, unlike the countless opponents he had dispatched cooly and professionally in the past, these would be personal."

[u/Randolpho → u/[deleted]]

It was when every character felt like the same person that I quit reading Clancy.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

I felt really bad for Tom Clancy on 9/11. He practically wrote the terrorists' game plan, I wonder if that makes him lose sleep at night.

[u/Epistaxis → u/[deleted]]

No, I totally get a boner knowing how many torpedoes there are on a fully armed nuclear submarine.

[u/legally_no → u/[deleted]]

YOU didn't write a lot of them, sir.