The Short Link Superpower lets your app turn long web addresses into short, easy-to-share links right inside the app. Instead of sharing a long, messy URL, your app can instantly create something like link.apphive.us/abc2p7, making it easy to read aloud, type on a phone, or write on a whiteboard.
Adding the Short Link Superpower to your app requires a Pro subscription. Your app and existing short links keep working, even if you later downgrade. Copying an app that uses short links also requires Pro.
How to add it to an app
Building short-link support into your app requires giving your AI chatbot instructions from Teacher Hive.
- In Teacher Hive, click Add App.
- Open the Short Link Superpower section and toggle it on.
- Click Copy AI Instructions.
- Paste the instructions into your AI chatbot (Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini).
- Tell the chatbot where you want short links to appear. For example: "add a Share button that copies a short link to the clipboard," or "after a student finishes, give them a short link they can use to come back to their saved progress."
- Paste the chatbot's generated HTML back into the App Code field and save.
What you can shorten
Any https URL, up to 4000 characters. Common targets:
- Teacher Hive app links with saved progress. Create a link that remembers where a student left off, so they can return to the exact same spot later.
- Public Google Docs, Slides, or Sheets. Quickly share readings, assignments, presentations, or worksheets from inside your app.
- Student or teacher creations inside the app. Share projects, drawings, responses, or other creations so others can open and view them.
- Other public websites and online resources. Link to videos, articles, simulations, or any other public webpage.
How the slug is picked
The slug is the part after the slash, like link.apphive.us/library-hours. Your app can let you choose it. Slugs are 4 to 24 characters: lowercase letters, numbers, and hyphens.
Slugs are first come, first served across all of Teacher Hive, and a slug is never reused. An old handout can never start leading somewhere unexpected.
If your app does not ask for a slug, Teacher Hive picks 6 random characters, leaving out ones that are easy to confuse (no i, l, o, 0, or 1).
Rate limits
To protect against accidental loops and abuse, URL shortening is limited to:
- 100 shortens per guest per hour.
- 1,000 shortens per app per day (resets at midnight UTC).
- 20 changes per link per day, and 200 changes per teacher per day.
The AI Instructions teach the chatbot to handle surpassing the rate limit by falling back to the long URL, so a share button keeps working even when shortening is throttled.
When you delete the app
Links you make yourself belong to your account, not to the app. Delete the app and they keep working, so a QR code you printed and laminated stays good.
Links your app makes automatically for guests belong to the app, and are deleted with it.
Change where a link goes
Point an existing link at a new destination any time. The short link stays the same, so anything you already published, and any QR code you printed, keeps working. Teacher Hive checks each new destination for safety, the same as when the link was made.
See how many visits a link has had
Every link keeps a visit count and a day-by-day history. Link previewers, like the ones in Slack, Teams, and Outlook, are counted separately and left out, so the number means people. Teacher Hive records no information about who visited a link.
Your app's Stats page shows how many short links it has made.
If your Pro subscription ends
Your links keep working forever. Making changes and seeing visit counts pause until you renew.
A note about previews
When your app uses a Superpower, the preview inside your AI chatbot (Claude's Canvas, ChatGPT's Canvas, Gemini's Canvas) will not be able to access the Superpower. The Short Link Superpower only works once the app is hosted on Teacher Hive. Paste the chatbot's code into the Add App form and test it from there.
Sample Prompt
In addition to pasting the Short Link Superpower AI Instructions into your chat, you need to describe your app and exactly how short links work. Here's an example for an Confetti Celebration app:
Build a personalized celebration card in HTML. The teacher types a student's name and a short achievement line (like "Read 100 books this year"), then taps Share to copy a short link to the finished card. When the recipient opens the short link, the name flies in big, confetti rains down, and a cheer plays, with the achievement in smaller text below.
Encode the name and achievement in the URL so the celebration renders directly when someone opens the link. Two states: the builder view for the teacher, the celebration view for the recipient. Joyful but not gaudy, no scrolling, mobile-friendly.
[Paste Short Link AI Instructions]
The Confetti Celebration app produces a short URL like this one: link.apphive.us/ktab95
That app expands into a URL that contains the info the app needs to show the personalized certificate: https://apphive.us/celebrate?n=Teacher+Hive+User&a=Reading+the+site%27s+Help+pages%21&t=Tony+Vincent&th=royal&st=6
