Hello my friends! Yes, I’m finally back from my two-week vacation. It was awesome, I spent a week in Magnitogorsk and another one in Sochi. The weather was great, it only rained on Sunday, when I was on my way back. Everything went fine, I’ve seen all my friends, we had a great time. Sochi is okay, getting ready for year 2014, though their airport in Adler still sucks big time!
Anyways, back to Moscow and back to work, and today I’d like to introduce a new feature in the Twitter Friendly Links plugin for WordPress. I call it the Alphanumeric mode, or format, or whatever. You see, people are used to TinyURL and bit.ly, where links are hashed and alphanumeric most of the time. I used a simple base 32 encoding algorithm in my case, plus added a few thousand, so that the links wouldn’t be shorter than three symbols. Not very nice to see example.com/a I guess.. Right? The Generic mode is still there and switched on by default for all the retro guys like me ;) Yes, I do prefer numbers and I know bit.ly would if they hadn’t hosted thousands of new links every day.
Also, I removed the rev=canonical option cause it’s pretty much outdated and encourage you to use the rel=shortlink HTML and HTTP headers, and rel=canonical too, as encouraged by wordpress.org. By the way, it’s pretty cool to see wordpress.com blogs get shortened links by wp.me as announced here: WP.me – shorten your links and they too support shortlink relations (both HTML and HTTP), which was why I decided to stick to them. Right, as Sam Johnston mentioned in the comments, that made over 7 million blogs accept the shortlink relations. Twitter clients should now be thinking about plugging that into the clients. It would make linking much easier, although may be a little more traffic consuming.
Or what if the guys from Twitter would.. Arrgh, hell no =) Impossible…
P.S. Hope you switched to WordPress 2.8.4 in time before the massive password reset attacks ;) I’m kidding, there were no massive attacks.. I guess =)
I’m so glad to be back. Have a great day everyone!
Thanks to Josh Jones for noting a critical bug in 0.4.1 which was fixed today. Please upgrade to 0.4.2 everyone =)
Wow this is a great idea! Well done K and glad you liked your vacation.
Thank you, I actually did =)
According to the comments in the wp.me announcements, rel=shortlink will be coming soon to the wordpress.org software! Between that and support in Drupal core that was coded at DrupalCon Paris yesterday there will soon be no excuse for clients and (finally) the linkrot should start to subside.
Sam
Wow, does that mean that my plugin's got a few more months to live?