QR Codes +1

Since the last post about those nifty little QR codes was so awesome, I thought I’d add one more: creating QR codes using the goo.gl URL shortener, automatically. Hang on a sec, before you hyperventilate, it is possible.

If you’re a Google Chrome user, there’s a browser extension called goo.gl URL Shortener that will reach out to Google’s URL shortener API to create a short URL for you on the fly. Sadly, I don’t think the web interface for goo.gl is available otherwise. Once you have a goo.gl short URL, all you have to do to get the corresponding QR code for that URL is add .qr to the end of it, like so:

http://goo.gl/EFj6 becomes http://goo.gl/EFj6.qr

When wrapped in image tags, it looks like this:

And here’s the HTML:

<img src="http://goo.gl/EFj6.qr" alt="QR code for eison.net" />

QR Codes Demystified

If you have a smart phone, hopefully Android, you’ve probably seen a QR code or two. Yep, they’re those crazy, bar code-looking things that you can scan with your phone’s bar code reader, that will link you directly to something, like an app in the Android Market.

Turns out that there are lots of QR code generators out here that’ll help you create a code for quite a few things: Android Market apps, URLs, a block of text, or your contact information. If you take a look at the other posts and pages on this site, you’ll see examples of three of those. It’s great to be able to use someone else’s code to generate things for you, but what if you found out that you can do the same thing with just a little HTML of you own?

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