You can make use of the THREAD and POST tags to save some space. For example:

[thread=220195]The Index of the Giant's Comments[/thread] will give you this:

The Index of the Giant's Comments

Which will take you to the first post of this thread. You get the number to use in the THREAD tag right from the URL when you've clicked a link for a thread, for example:

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=220195

is the URL for this thread.

The POST tag works similarly.

[post=14798404]ThePhantasm's most recent post in this thread as of me starting this post[/post] will give you this:

ThePhantasm's most recent post in this thread as of me starting this post

You can get the number to use in a POST tag by hovering your mouse over - or clicking on - the number in the top right corner of every post. In that URL, there will be a string that starts &p={some number}. What you want is the {some number} part.

I think those tags will use less space than the URL tag with a tiny url source in them. Hope that proves helpful.