If you use a lot of TinyURLs on your blog, you might want to checkout this new tool - Embiggen. It expands those cryptic TinyURLs (eg tinyurl.com/2dfmty) to their full version, allowing your readers to make an informed decision about following a link. (That's good URL etiquette.)

It's available as a button to insert into any page eg Blogger, but it's especially handy for micro-blogging services like Twitter. You can also get it as a bookmarklet for when you're browsing around and come across a mysterious TinyURL.

See demo and get buttons

The hack works by using Dapper to grab the URL from the TinyURL preview page and munging the resulting JSON object with regular expressions.

I cobbled this together as part of another project on URL manipulation and tagging, but thought it might be useful enough to release on its own. There's no reason why this approach couldn't be applied to other common-yet-cryptic URLs, like YouTube, so watch this space.

Any other suggestions, feedback, bug reports etc? Please leave a comment.

Filed in: webtech, hacks, tinyURL, bookmarklets