Photo by Lall

You know them, you love them and I’m going to show you how you can have your own. If you’ve interacted with social media at all in the past two years, you’ve seen the proliferation of “Short URLs”—links people share on services like Twitter that redirect to a longer destination URL. They are the must have, Internet equivalent of skinny jeans this summer. Two Wordpress plugins were brought to my attention in the aftermath abrupt demise of URL shortening service tr.im and it’s subsequently under-explained resurrection last week. Worried about your leaving your links in the hands of some fly-by-night service? I’m here to give you some options.

ShortURL Plugin

I found out about the Wordpress plugin ShortURL Plugin in this article on Jeffery Zeldman’s Blog. After installing this plugin you get a Short URL Plugin admin page where you can paste in any URL and have it generate a short URL using your domain name. The plugin tracks the number of times the link has been clicked. You can also edit the URL’s trailing information, the default URLs end with “/u/” then an auto generated number. For example, the short URL for this post is now http://jeremyturner.net/u/3. It would be nice if this plugin auto-generated links to all of your posts and pages upon installation, but alas it does not.

I would love to see this plugin mature to the point where someone who already has hosting and a short domain name could roll their own vanity URL shortener. After installing Wordpress, this plugin, and nothing else, one could use the new domain exclusively for generating short URLs to share. My first inclination when reading about Short URL was to try this approach, but the plugin isn’t there yet. More robust metrics would be nice too.

La Petite URL

La Petite URL automatically generates short URLs from pages on your site. Once installed, the plugin auto-generates a URL for every page and post in your site. The new, shortened URL is displayed in the right-hand sidebar of the Post or Page editing menu. La Petite URL also supports the Short URL Auto-Discovery specification, a method where the preferred short URL is specified in the *head*  section of your HTML document. On the upside the auto generation of the URL is a nice feature, but La Petite URL does not allow you to create links to content outside of your domain like Short URL does. It also does not supply any metrics for the generated links.

Hosted solutions

For $49 a year, Tinyarro.ws will help you find and host your very own short URL service with support for Unicode characters in the URL. This means that you can use unicode characters like the arrow, star, and Snowman in your short URL. Somebody please register http://*unicode snowman*FTW/ for me. Great for branding, this is what John Gruber is using for his links to Daring Fireball on Twitter. All of his links have his trademark Unicode star in the URL.

Awe.sm provides a similar service as Tinyarro.ws, for $99 a year, and seems to offer more robust analytics and integration with third party services for tracking your influence on others. I haven’t tried either of these services so I cannot comment on their pros or cons other than to say if you want a snowman in your URL, go with Tinyarro.ws.

In addition to these options Wordpress.com has announced that they have implemented short, “wp.me” URLs for every post and page for every site hosted on Wordpress.com. How awfully nice of them. I don’t have a Wordpress hosted site so I’m not sure how this is implemented, but if you have one let me know how it works for you.

I like the idea of having as much control as possible over the links you provide to others ensuring they don’t end up broken, or in the wrong hands. Are there any other plugins or services that I missed? Let me know in the comments.