TinyURL and XRL.us are great URL shortening services. Unfortunately, while they were intended for good, they have been used for evil, namely: Rick Rolling.
TinyURL will let you turn on previews (which keep you from being redirected before you see the destination URL) here: http://tinyurl.com/preview.php
If you are enough of a Terminal geek, you might like showurls.sh which is a script I wrote.
Usage is simple, after installing (see script for details) simply use “showurls.sh http://some/short/url/here” such as
showurls.sh http://xrl.us/bip6p
which should give you output like:
http://xrl.us/bip6p points to http://www.comics2film.com/index.php?a=story&b=32203&c=22 Title: The Elevator: ‘Panthea Obscura’ - Story @ Comics2Film.com
(NOTE: if you see “tr: Illegal byte sequence” just ignore it)
Tested 99.99% effective against being Rick Rolled. The “Title” part is hacky and might not work, but the “points to” should work with TinyURL, XRL.us, and any other service which redirects using the Location: header.
Other note: if you clicked on either one of two links explicitly marked as RickRolls, I might not be able to help you.
Download showurls.sh