RevCanonical

RevCanonical generates a short url for your pages, as well as adding link shortening discovery. You can use this url on character restricted sites like Twitter, in IM, or anytime you need a short link to your webpages. The discovery part means that other sites and services can also use the short url should they need it. Oh and this short url is yours, from your website. It does not use any external service.

Here’s what gets added to your pages. The link in the href is the short version you can use:

<link rev="canonical" type="text/html" href="http://my-domain.me/p12p" /> 

This tag can though be customised to suit your own preferences (at your own risk), for instance this:

<link rel="shortlink" href="http://my-mini.me/p12p" /> 

That’s it! You can now, not only use this url to pass around, and in sites like Twitter without having to go via a url shortening service, but services or people that understand the rev=canonical link tag, will be able to use this shortened version over the longer canonical version. It also means that it’s persistence is down to you, and not to a 3rd party.

Oh and there’s a great bookmarklet that makes hunting for existing short urls on a page really simple. You can read more about this plugin at my website http://littl.me/p136

NOTE: I use the Day and name style permalinks in WordPress. I can’t be sure the plugin will work if you use other formats.

What’s changed? View the CHANGELOG

Advanced

The default settings should suit most people, but if there are a couple of things you can change should you wish. There are also a few tags you can use within your own pages.

If your domain name is a bit long and you own a smaller domain you would like to use as your shortened domain, you can add this in the settings page. You would then just need to make sure that the new domain pointed to the original via a ProxyPass setting.

There are many ongoing conversations on the web about how to describe shortened links in HTML. There appears to be no absolute right way, so by default if will be rev=canonical. Should you want to use another way, you can also change this via the settings page.

And finally… there are a couple of tags you can use in your own templates, that will return the short link for that page. You need to pass them the post ID.

<?php get_revcanonical_link($post->ID) ?> ===> Echo the shorturl to the screen

<?php $url = revcanonical_link($post->ID) ?> ===> Assign the shorturl to a variable