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

This post initially appeared on FreeTech4Teachers.com. It has been utilized without approval if you see it somewhere else.

There is an easy way to quickly identify whats behind a Bitly URL without actually 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 instead of to whatever the initial URL was.
You can attempt this trick with a URL that I recently shortened. Bit.ly/ THWTAPRIL will lead you straight to a copy of the slides that I used in my recent Intro to Teaching History With Technology webinar. Bit.ly/ THWTAPRIL+ will lead you to the Bitly page where you can see my initial discussion URL and see when I produced the reduced URL..
Watch this brief video to see how you can utilize the “+” technique to discover whats concealed behind a Bitly link..

Applications for Education.
Building excellent digital citizenship and cyber safety skills is something that everyone need to be helping our students do. Showing them little ideas like this one to avoid clicking on suspicious links is one of the manner ins which we can help our trainees build their digital citizenship and cyber security skills.

Bitly is an useful URL shortener that Ive used for lots of years. There is a simple method to quickly identify whats behind a Bitly URL without actually clicking on the link. The technique is to just include a “+” to the end of any Bitly URL. When you add the “+” the URL will reroute to Bitly rather of to whatever the original URL was.

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

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

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

Bitly is a convenient URL shortener that Ive used for lots of years. As a registered user I can develop custom, shortened URLs that individuals can really spell. I utilize these whenever I need to share a link to a Canva or Google Slides discussion because the default URLs provided by those services are incoherent and constantly long..

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