The utility of a URL shortener

I've setup Twitter Tools to post links to my blog posts to Twitter and that's been working well. I did this as one of my friends doesn't subscribe to my RSS feed, but likes to read my posts. He is a frequent Twitter user, so this solution works well. Since I haven't been using a URL shortener, some of my posts don't make it to Twitter as the URL and title make the post over the Twitter limit of 140 characters. The other day, I decided to see about solving this.

There are a number of URL shortening services out there, but I kind of have a problem relying on a third party for the service. Also, one of the most popular one, bitly, is under a Libyan top level domain. I found YOURLS the other day and set it up. It was pretty easy to setup and I picked a subdomain for easy management. The Wordpress Plugin for it kept creating extra links and that kind of annoyed me. I found that someone created a Twitter Tools plugin to work with YOURLS. I tested it and it worked perfectly.

So, now all my posts to Twitter are using my own URL shortener. The URL shortener is pretty maintenance free and easy to setup, so as long as I have my blog around, I think I can keep this running.

Comments

May 8th, 2011
Stew

Hey Scott,

Glad the yourls shortener plugin is working, just give a shout if it starts acting up. See as people are using it maybe I should submit it to the Wordpress Plugin Directory.

May 8th, 2011
Scott Gruby

Thanks for putting this together. I did have to add:

$url = str_replace("https://","http://", $url);

at the beginning of the shortening block as I use SSL for my admin, but non-SSL for the site. Other than that, it’s working great!