I was in a quandary. I wanted the long permalinks for my blog posts,which made links self-describing and also search engine friendly. And I also wanted short URLs that I could pass on in emails. I share [the sentiments of Andy Wibbels][1] regarding [TinyURL][2]. Nothing against TinyURL personally, just that when you have your own domain name for your blog, wouldn’t you prefer using tiny urls using your own domain name?
So I extended the [one liner][1] by Andy Wibbels and created a real small plugin, to display the “tiny url” in your post.
[1]: http://easybakeweblogs.com/2005/01/20/i-hate-tinyurl/
[2]: http://www.tinyurl.com/
To use it:
1. Download it from [here][3].
2. Rename it to `wptinyurl.php`.
3. Copy it into the `wp-content/plugins` directory in your WP root.
4. Activate the plugin in your WP admin section.
5. Then use the function `wptinyurl()` in your template files, wherever you want the tinyurl of the post to be displayed.
[3]: http://www.sandipb.net/downloads/wptinyurl.txt
In my case, to display the tiny urls in my posts, I have added the following line just before `edit_post_link()` in the `single.php` file in the theme directory. The relevant section of the file in my case now looks like this:
By default, the code uses the prefix `/bl/` for generating your tinyurls. So your typical tinyurls will be `http://yourdomain/bl/nn`, where nn is your post id.
To customize, edit the `wptinyurl.php` file, and change the variables as commented.
1. Change `$prefix` from `/bl/` to any other that you want. Just remember to keep the slashes at the beginning and the end of the string.
2. Change `$text` to whichever template you want to use to print your tiny url. Just remember, to use `%s` wherever you want the tiny url to be substituted. If you use `%s` more or less than twice, remember to change the first `printf` function in the code accordingly.
3. As an added feature, if you set the variable `$print_rule` to `True` in the code, the code will also provide you with the `.htaccess` rule that you require to make the tinyurl work. The rule will be inside an HTML comment. You can simply copy-paste from the HTML source of the page and add it at the end of the `.htaccess` file in your domain web root. You can set this variable to false after you have configured your `.htaccess` file.
That’s it.
