Three Minute Tech Byte: URL Shorteners
URL shorteners can make life easy when you are teaching or sharing. Simply copy that really, long nasty URL into: bit.ly or tinyurl or goo.gl and use a shortened version. As always, your feedback is important, leave your thoughts in the form below:
Transcript
Scott: Hi there, this is Scott and Ginger!
Ginger: Hey!
Scott: And today for the three-minute tech byte we want to show you how to use a URL shortener. What do you think Ginger?
Ginger: Let’s do it.
Scott: Alright, first up is bitly.com. What do you do?
Ginger: Well if you have a URL that is really long on has a lot of gobble-de-gook, you can copy that…
Scott: I happen to have one right here…
Ginger: And you just paste it in…
Scott: So I did control “c”
Ginger: Control “c” and control “v”
Scott: Right. And if you are on a mac its command “v” and command “c” and then there it is. There’s my shortened URL. So I took this really long URL right here: education dive dot com slash news slash Connecticut hyphen blah blah blah blah blah…And I took that long nasty URL and it put it into the little bitly right here which you can share with your students. Or your friends. And its way easier to get to.
Ginger: Mmm-hmm.
Scott: What’s the next one?
Ginger: The next one is tiny url dot com.
Scott: And it works the same way right?
Ginger: Mmm-hmm.
Scott: so all we need is the long URL.
Ginger: Right
Scott: And we paste it in and we get a shortened URL…make it tiny…And there it is right there. This guy. Tiny URL right there, how easy is that?
Ginger: And another great thing about this one is that you can customize your alias. If you want to change it so that its not tiny URL slash k-t-3 etc. You can make a tiny URL your first name, your course number, or something like that.
Scott: As long as it hasn’t been used.
Ginger: Yes
Scott: And you can do the same thing with bitly.
Ginger: Can you?
Scott: Yeah.
Ginger: Ok
Scott: Learn something new every day, that’s what I say. The last one we want to show you, for those of you who have a Google account – you can do what I like to refer to as a googly. Which is a goo dot g-l. Let’s just say goo a few times. That’s just a fun word.
Ginger: Goo
Scott: Yes. And then the same thing. You simply click in and paste your original URL and choose to shorten it. And there it is right here. This v-w-i-9-x-f. And with the googly it gives you this extra window, the other two do not. And I believe all of them also give you a click count. To indicate how many times a specific URL has been updated. And I don’t believe you can make your googly unique.
Ginger: No, I don’t think so.
Scott: But you can with your bitly and your tiny URL. So there you go there is your URL shortener. Let us know what you think about these three-minute tech bytes. You can email us at any time or if you have a suggestion for a future tech byte…
Ginger: Yeah, let us know.
Scott: Indeed, thank you and we hope you enjoyed.