Almost two years ago I wrote about a new short URL system I started using on this blog. I’m finally releasing this in plugin form with a few additional improvements. WordPress has support for “short urls” built in and will even let you use the wp.me system if you have the Jetpack plugin installed. Instead of using wp.me, I like using my own custom domain. This plugin gives you an option to set the short domain that you’d like to use and includes the helper files to install on the short domain.
Installation
Installing the plugin is fairly straight forward, but there are a couple extra steps to get your short domain up and running.
- Buy a short domain. This won’t work on the same domain you’re using for your WordPress site, it will have to be a different domain. I’d recommend a 3-letter .me or .co domain if you can get one.
- Upload the two files located in the short.domain folder you get with the plugin. These should be
.htaccessandindex.php. - Modify short.domain/index.php with the correct
$domainvariable. This is the full-length domain that the short-url should forward to.
That’s it. You’re done.
Since there’s a good chance the primary reason you’re doing this is for twitter, support for Twitter Tools is included. Twitter tools is nice because it’s pluggable, so plugin authors like me can write custom shorteners for it. Just activate Twitter Tools along with the JB Shortener plugin and you should have custom short urls going out to Twitter automatically.