Many times you will see a shortened url but you aren’t sure what it points at. Here’s a little tip that I picked up from Tom Morris.

Pop open your terminal, or console, or whatever your command-line application is and type the following:

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curl --head shorturl

This pops up a short amount of useful information about the target url. For example the response for the Google short URL for this site shows this;

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~ % curl --head http://goo.gl/oQx8
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Expires: Sat, 16 Oct 2010 21:01:51 GMT
Date: Sat, 16 Oct 2010 21:01:51 GMT
Cache-Control: private, max-age=86400
Location: http://abizern.org/
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN
X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block
Server: GSE
Transfer-Encoding: chunked

And you can see that the Location shows that you aren’t going to get Rick-rolled.