Shorten & Bundle URLs with Bitly

Bitly isn't exactly news to anyone keeping their finger on the pulse of IT tools, but it's one that I've ignored for too long now, much to my own detriment. Hold back the "doh" but I only realised today that you can actually customise the shortened url to something that might actually be recognisable or memorable. So from

http://sites.google.com/a/domain.name.co.uk/website-name

I can now choose something much less mind-boggling like

http://bit.ly/website-name 

When I'd tried it in the past, I was bemused at the odd scientific-looking url that was generated and didn't really see the point, but the customisability changes all that.

Another cool feature is that you can also 'bundle' a group of URLs and put them under just one shortened url. Check it out here.

Integration:

• If you're using a third-party site host, as many teachers do, it probably means you have a long URL so bit.ly will be great for creating something much more manageable
• If you have a list of links related to a particular topic, bundling them is a great way to avoid sendin out a long list of web addresses