I was in search of a way to automagically get an alternate short link for the lengthy URL of my articles. I tried a plugin but somehow went kaput and never worked for me. I decided to write one for myself and came up with a very simple solution. - Tiny Link.
Well, Tiny Link is a Wordpress plugin that creates an alternate TinyURL link to your article or post permalink.
I hope this will be useful while sending hyperlinks in emails to avoid the word-wrap for lengthy article URLs. This should also be useful (as far as I can guess) to mobile device users so they will can type a shorter url to read an article.
TINY LINK
- Visit & Download Tiny Link from Wordpress.
USAGE
The most straight forward usage would be to add this simple script
<?php TinyLink() ?>
to one of your template - “single.php”.
However, a slightly advanced usage will be, to first check if the plugin is installed, if yes, then execute this module. We can even give a direct link to it, so users can copy the link by right-clicking (Mac: Ctrl + Click) the hyperlink.
<?php if (function_exists('TinyLink')) { ?>
Tiny alternate link for this article:
<a href="<?php TinyLink() ?>" title="TinyURL link to - <?php the_title(); ?>"><?php TinyLink() ?></a>
<?php } ?>
Feel free to give me your feedbacks, errors encountered, bugs founds, et al. If you wish to take it further, you’re most welcome to join the project.
Don't like it? There are lots of published articles, pick a random one.
Brajeshwar posted this article
on Sat, Aug 18th, 2007 at 3:14 am
Categorized under Technology and has the following tags
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One of the cutest plugin out there
This is a fantastic blog. I wish I had known it much earlier.
I blogged about you. Pl read it here.
Is this an ‘SEO-friendly’ plugin?
i.e. is this a 301 redirect?
@Mutiny Design:
No, and there is no reason to make it such. Tiny Link should be used as an alternative link to be used while sending links to somebody or to type on a mobile device or when you just need a shorter link. The main link should be used for the usual purposes - linkbacks, hyperlinking within your article.
Frankly speaking, i don’t think that it is so useful. Just one more plugin to satisfy customers needs and wants.
Very true. I needed something to get my job done and so, I came up with this plugin. I released it to the public, just in case somebody needs something similar.
Are there any plans to update this to support WordPress 2.5?
@K1DF0X
I don’t remember anything complicated or un-usual that it should not work with Wordpress 2.5. Have you tried it? My feeling is that it should work.
Hmm, the problem I have is once I have inserted the code into my template, the default text “TinyURL alternative…” appears but the actual TinyURL link isn’t there.
@K1DF0X
It works for me on both Wordpress 2.5 and 2.5.1. If you can show us your site, it will be easier to see the actual issue. Would you like to try the forum and post the necessary issue in the “Tiny Link” Wordpress Plugin Section.
This is a great idea! I took the idea further with Tweet This, which caches the shortened URLs so they aren’t fetched on every page load, and taps right into Twitter’s API so your readers don’t have to copy and paste.
Twitter has an API where anything that appears after the equal sign in the URL http://twitter.com/home/?status= appears in the post box. You may want to mention it in your description; you could easily use something like
<?php echo ‘<a href=”http://twitter.com/home/?status=’ . TinyLink() . ‘” title=”Post to Twitter”>’ . TinyLink() . ‘</a>’; ?>
to do that.
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