Martin Wright made a good point in his guest post on TwiTip about using our own blog domain to host short URLs pointing to your blog posts, instead of services like TinyURL, Bit.ly and tr.im.
Martin suggested the use of Short URL WordPress Plugin to do the job, but I see a better way to do it.
Back to the basic, what was the permalink structure when you first installed WordPress? The ugly permalink structure that looks like this:
http://www.sheeptech.com/?p=123 (123 is the Post-ID)
Most WordPress users would change their permalink structure to a more SEO friendly ones, instead of keeping the ugly permalink structure above.
However, an ugly permalink will not stop working even after the permalink structure is changed. Instead, it will automatically redirect you to the actual blog post with the correct permalink. For example:
http://www.sheeptech.com/?p=881 will redirect to http://www.sheeptech.com/youtube-mutes-video-with-copyrighted-songs
Say I would like to share my blog post on YouTube Muting Videos on Twitter, I’d post it as (http://www.sheeptech.com/?p=881), instead of the full permalink of it or a third party short URL like http://tr.im/8y5j.
How to identify Post-ID?
The ugly permalink structure looks like this: http://www.sheeptech.com/?p=[Post-ID]. You first have to identify the Post-ID of your blog post, before you can use the ugly permalink as a short URL.
To identify the Post-ID of your blog post, just look at the address bar when you are editing or writing a post. The Post-ID would be the number next to “post=“.
The benefits:
- No extra work. The ugly permalink is generated automatically everytime you publish a blog post. No need of a plugin at all.
- The URL will not be broken. Even when you change your permalink struture again, the ugly permalink will still point to the same blog post. If you’re using a plugin to shorten URLs, they might be broken if the plugin went wrong, but the ugly permalink will almost never be broken.
- You can call up the Post ID within your blog template using the
<?php the_ID(); ?>tag.
As there is no extra work for this method, I can conveniently add a Twitter button onto all my blog post. This is the line I inserted to single.php:
<a rel="nofollow" href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Reading: (<?php the_title(); ?>) at http://sheeptech.com/?p=<?php the_ID(); ?>"><img src="http://www.sheeptech.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/twiter_01-w32-h32.png" alt="Tweet This" /></a>
Click on the blue bird at the end of this post for a demo.
Bharat (3)
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21 Jan 09
2:43 am
Good thinking, but I don’t like the concept. http://is.gd/abc is much shorter than http://sheeptech.com/?p=135 (with twitter every extra character counts)
21 Jan 09
12:18 pm
It depends, if you are want to save more on URL so that you can talk more, this is not a good option—unless you have a very short URL for your blog too.
The good is people know exactly where the URL will be bringing them, and your blog brand gets some exposure even if they don’t click on it.
14 Feb 09
4:01 am
This would be cool if there was a plugin to auto tweet, ala twitter tools, that used the “ugly links” instead of tweeting the SEO friendly post url. It should also pull the www. from the beginning, thats 4 characters. Should look something like http://yourdomain.com/?p=135
14 Feb 09
2:45 pm
You mean tools like twitterfeed? If yes, I personally thinks that it is more personal to tweet your blog post yourself, instead of using a bot.
Wouldn’t be a heavy task, unless you blog very frequent, say tens in a day.
20 Feb 09
8:32 pm
Yes, it needs to get posted immediately from frequent daily posts for one particular site of mine. Timing is sometimes critical and Twitter makes the notification lightning fast, in most cases.
03 Apr 09
10:43 pm
Thanks for the idea! I was planning to use that short url plugin you mentioned, but I was wondering how to go about making it automatic for users to tweet it… and your solution looks perfect!
My reason for doing it is what Vincent already mentioned in his earlier comment: even if they don’t click on it, your domain is in front of them. Excellent!
15 Apr 09
11:29 am
The mac has a great multiple clipboard tool called CopyPaste Pro that has a link shortener built in so you just highlight click a button and you have the short URL in the clipboard to paste anywhere.
http://www.scriptsoftware.com/copypaste
Also it is just as essential as the clipboard itself. Seriously useful.
10 Aug 09
2:31 am
One question though… with regards to TweetMeme…does it also track those ugly URLs or does the Tweetmeme assigned URL (e.g. bit.ly/sample) have to be tweeted for it to be checked?
07 Dec 09
6:45 pm
Great idea. But it looks like Twitter now changed the way it displays hyperlinks and cuts it off before the question mark.
10 Jul 10
1:37 am
This absolutely worked for me. I’ll keep an eye on it and see if crayoncrisis’ issue is still valid. Thanks! I wanted a homemade Twitter button and the long permalinks were causing an issue for me. View the end product here: http://twitter.com/rileycentral/status/18135259893
(Damien Riley´s blog – The Oatmeal aka Matthew Inman – online genius)
10 Jul 10
2:39 pm
@crayoncrisis: I’m unaware of that. Damien’s sample tweet looks fine to me.
02 Aug 10
4:15 am
Thanks for the great tip!