Embiggen TinyURL

This tool automatically expands any TinyURLs embedded in the page (like tinyurl.com/2dfmty).

TinyURL is a great service, but who knows what's lurking on the other side of those links? They could be pointing at sites you've already visited, spam, malware, shock sites or other dangerous and time-wasting material. Protect yourself online by getting a heads-up!

Embiggen uses a Dapper service to expand any mysterious TinyURLs into their full version. Try this demo to see it working:

1: Demo

Click the Embiggen button to activate the demo. You should see the URLs and titles of the TinyURLs update after a couple of seconds. (Mouse over the links and check the URL in the status bar of your browser to see the changes.) Just refresh the page to reset the TinyURLs.

2: For Publishers

If you use TinyURLs a lot on your website (Blogger, WordPress, Twitter, MySpace etc), then you can put an Embiggen button on your page like this. Now your readers can know what they're getting before they click.

Just copy/paste this code into your template:

<input type="button" value="Embiggen" onclick='Embiggen={"runNow":true}; var s=document.createElement("script"); s.type="text/javascript"; s.src="http://ghill.customer.netspace.net.au/embiggen/embiggen.js"; document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(s);'></input>

Since the script is released under a Creative Commons licence, you can re-use the code in your web applications.

3: For Browsers

If you come across a lot of TinyURLs on the web, you can't bank on publishers being thoughtful enough to provide a magic button. Instead, you can use a bookmarklet to do on-the-fly conversions on any page:

Test it out - click the link! To install the button on your browser, just drag this link onto your browser's links bar. (Alternatively, right click and bookmark the link.)

Comments, feedback, troubleshooting, suggestions and discussions to Freshblog, please.

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