Best of 2021 – See What’s Behind Bitly and TinyURL Without Clicking

As I do every year, Im taking today as a break from releasing new article and will be republishing some of the most popular posts of the year. Heres one from April.

There is an easy method to quickly identify whats behind a Bitly URL without really clicking on the link. The trick is to simply add a “+” to the end of any Bitly URL. When you include the “+” the URL will reroute to Bitly rather of to whatever the initial URL was.
You can try this technique with a URL that I recently reduced. Bit.ly/ THWTAPRIL will lead you directly to a copy of the slides that I used in my current Intro to Teaching History With Technology webinar. Bit.ly/ THWTAPRIL+ will lead you to the Bitly page where you can see my original presentation URL and see when I produced the shortened URL..
Watch this short video to see how you can utilize the “+” technique to learn whats hidden behind a Bitly link..

Bitly is an useful URL shortener that Ive utilized for several years. As a registered user I can develop customized, shortened URLs that people can in fact spell. I utilize these whenever I require to share a link to a Canva or Google Slides presentation because the default URLs supplied by those services are always long and incoherent..

Applications for Education.
Structure great digital citizenship and cyber safety abilities is something that everybody need to be helping our students do. Showing them little pointers like this one to avoid clicking suspicious links is among the manner ins which we can help our trainees develop their digital citizenship and cyber safety skills.

Heres a video summary of how to see whats behind a TinyURL without in fact clicking the link.

If you want to try this with a TinyURL, tinyurl.com/emkns9a8 will lead you to the page for the Practical Ed Tech Virtual Summer Camp, however adding a “+” at the end of that TinyURL will take you to the page where you can see the initial link without clicking it.

Bitly is an useful URL shortener that Ive used for many years. There is a simple way to rapidly identify whats behind a Bitly URL without in fact clicking on the link. The technique is to just add a “+” to the end of any Bitly URL. When you add the “+” the URL will redirect to Bitly rather of to whatever the original URL was.

This post initially appeared on FreeTech4Teachers.com. If you see it in other places, it has been utilized without permission.

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