Technology tip: How to shorten your long web links (URLs)

Do you ever want to give students a link for a document or website during class but the URL is too long to reasonably type? For example, let’s say I want to give students the link during class to a blog post I wrote. The original blog post URL is long – see https://accountingintheheadlines.com/2016/06/07/what-is-the-impact-on-snapchats-balance-sheet-from-its-latest-issuance-of-stock/. However, I can shorten that URL to tiny.cc/blog001 which is easy to type and to share.

My favorite URL shortener site is tiny.cc. I like this site because it allows you to customize your shortened URL rather than giving you a random URL. (For example, the URL for the blog post I mentioned in the first paragraph would be shortened to https://goo.gl/dXWTNg by googl.gl.) Tiny.cc is also a free service.

One word of advice – create an account at tiny.cc before using it to shorten URLs.  If you create an account before you make a custom shortened URL, then you can actually edit the link that that custom URL is pointing to later. For example, you might want to change the URL and use the same shortened URL if you created a shortened link for Exam 1 notes.  I have put my own notes for my students for Exam 1 at tiny.cc/exam1notes. Each semester, I update the notes and then put the updated link in tiny.cc and still use that same URL tiny.cc/exam1notes (you can change what link the tiny.cc points to at any time.)

Another reason for using a URL shortener is to create “permanent” links to course documents. For example, you can create a shortened custom URL with a link to your syllabus. My syllabus for my summer 2016 class can be found at tiny.cc/summersyllabus. In every future summer, I will update the tiny.cc link to point to the new URL for my new syllabus. The shortened URL for my summer syllabus will always be tiny.cc/summersyllabus. This reuse of the tiny.cc URL makes it so that I do not have to update the syllabus link throughout a Learning Management System (LMS) such as Blackboard or Moodle.