So I guess the modern equivalent of the vanity email address is the vanity URL shortener. I registered ian.lc because it was available and cheapish and because bit.ly’s links keep getting longer and longer.
I tried both Google’s and Bit.ly’s BYO domain shorteners and didn’t like them at all. Google forces you to use a subdomain and Bit.ly uses the same namespace for all shortening domains, so all it really offered was vanity, not improved shortness.
After a couple of wisely aborted efforts to write my own I just installed YOURLS, a simple, straight-forward, extensible URL shortener. Like all useful internet software it’s all PHP and MySQL so it took virtually no time to deploy – unzip, create database, edit config file, reload.
There’s a pretty good WordPress plugin that shortens a link and then posts to twitter that I’m experimenting with as a way to encourage myself to make longer than 140 character posts. Let’s see how that goes.
Now you just need to add link rel=”shorturl” tags on pages you shorten.
Is that actually widely supported? At all supported?
But yeah, I do.
Actually, it is adding a
Boo to url shorteners. The internet’s too expansive to click on every link, but url shorteners force you to look at everything just to see what someone’s linking to.
They’re a hack workaround for a bodgy medium and a layering violation. Couldn’t twitter just automatically url shorten for stingy things like SMS and leave normal URLs alone?
Well, Twitter both automatically shorten and automatically expand. They are a hack, but so are the exceedingly long URLs of our SEOed world 🙁
My favorite SEO URLs are news articles where the human-readable part of the URL isn’t matched at all, just a key elsewhere, so you can change it to say whatever you want.
Yeah we do that in Rdio. One kind of needs to these days 🙁