ShortURL

The ShortURL plugin allows you to use your blog as your own URL shorterning service by implementing the Short URL Auto-Discovery specification. Your short URLs will be in the form of http://domain/-code.

The auto-discovery feature allows third-party services that honor it to use your own short URLs instead of generating new ones using services such as TinyURL, bit.ly, and others. This gives your posts and pages canonical short URLs that give you all SEO benefits and don’t leak traffic out to external domains and will prevent linkrot. The homepage short URLs is set to just http://domain/ as a unique feature.

The other great benefit of the ShortURL plugin is that the generated short URLs won’t break if you change the permalink structure of your blog or rename the slug of a particular post or page.

Due to the recent choice of both the Microformats community and WordPress.com to use rel="shortlink" vs the alternative proposals, the ShortURL plugin is also using it now.

More on the topic:

• Microformats Wiki: rel=”shortlink”
• WP.me – shorten your links

To Do

• Test against WordPress 2.9 and WordPress MU
• Add a settings page
• Add a widget
• Integrated with Google Analytics
• Integrate with the top Twitter plugins to use ShortURL instead of third-party services