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

Bitly is a helpful URL shortener that Ive used for lots of years. There is an easy method to quickly identify whats behind a Bitly URL without really clicking on the link. The trick is to just include a “+” to the end of any Bitly URL. When you include the “+” the URL will redirect to Bitly rather of to whatever the initial URL was.

There is an easy method to rapidly determine whats behind a Bitly URL without in fact clicking on the link. The technique is to just include a “+” to the end of any Bitly URL. When you include the “+” the URL will redirect to Bitly instead of to whatever the original URL was.
You can try this technique with a URL that I recently shortened. 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 initial presentation URL and see when I developed the reduced URL..
See this brief video to see how you can use the “+” technique to discover out whats hidden behind a Bitly link..

This post originally appeared on FreeTech4Teachers.com. It has actually been used without authorization if you see it elsewhere.

As I do every year, Im taking this week as a break from publishing new post and will be republishing some of the most popular posts of the year. Heres one from April.

Applications for Education.
Structure great digital citizenship and cyber safety abilities is something that everybody ought to be assisting our students do. Showing them little tips like this one to prevent clicking on suspicious links is one of the ways that we can help our trainees build their digital citizenship and cyber safety abilities.

If you wish to attempt this with a TinyURL, tinyurl.com/emkns9a8 will lead you to the page for the Practical Ed Tech Virtual Summer Camp, however including 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 a convenient URL shortener that Ive used for several years. As a signed up user I can develop customized, reduced URLs that people can really spell. I use these whenever I need to share a link to a Canva or Google Slides presentation due to the fact that the default URLs provided by those services are incoherent and constantly long..

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

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