Hum

Hum is a personal URL shortener for WordPress, designed to provide short URLs to your personal content, both hosted on WordPress and elsewhere. For example, rather than a long URL for a WordPress post such as http://willnorris.com/2011/01/hum-personal-url-shortener-wordpress, you could have a short URL like http://willnorris.com/b/FJ. Additionally, if you have a custom domain for short URLs, you can shorten things further like http://wjn.me/b/FJ. Once the plugin is enabled, the shortlink for a page or post can be found in the “Shortlink” item in the WordPress Admin Bar.

WordPress post IDs are shortened using the NewBase60 encoding scheme which is specifically optimized for brevity and readability, with built-in error correction for commonly confused characters like ‘1’, ‘l’, and ‘I’.

Hum is not designed as a general purpose URL shortener along the lines of http://bit.ly or http://goo.gl. Rather, it is specifically intended as a personal shortener for your own content.

Read more about the reasoning for a personal URL shortener at Tantek Celik‘s page for Whistle, which served as the inspiration for Hum.

Developer Documentation

Adding your Amazon Affiliate ID

If you’d like to include your Amazone Affiliate ID in the /i/ redirect URLs, implement the amazon_affiliate_id filter. For example:

add_filter('amazon_affiliate_id', fn() => "willnorris-20");

Additional Local Types

Out of the box, Hum only registers the b, t, a and p prefix to be served locally by WordPress. If you would like to register additional prefixes, implement the hum_local_types filter. For example, to include ‘p’ as well for photos:

function myplugin_hum_local_types( $types ) {
  $types[] = 'p';
  return $types;
}
add_filter('hum_local_types', 'myplugin_hum_local_types');

This will tell Hum to serve any /p/{id} URLs from WordPress. Additionally, you’ll want to instruct Hum to use your prefix for that particular content type. Here, we’re registering ‘p’ which is normally used for photos.

function myplugin_hum_type_prefix( $prefix, $post_id ) {
  $post = get_post( $post_id );

  if ( $post->post_type == 'attachment' &&
       strpos($post->post_mime_type, 'image') === 0 ) {
    $prefix = 'p';
  }

  return $prefix;
}
add_filter('hum_type_prefix', 'myplugin_hum_type_prefix', 10, 2);

Simple Redirect

You can redirect all traffic for a prefix using a single line of PHP my implementing the hum_redirect_base_{type} filter where {type} is the prefix to redirect. For example, I redirect all /w/ URLs to wiki.willnorris.com using:

add_filter('hum_redirect_base_w', fn() => "http://wiki.willnorris.com/");