A big thanks to Brighton-based NixonMcInnes for supplying a Wordpress plugin that, with widespread adoption, would help ease the problem that would occur should one of the URL-shortening services die. Jeremy also writes about the problem here.
After activating the NixonMcInnes plugin, the url of this post will be both a search-engine friendly: http://www.iestyn.net/wp/2009/04/07/short-urls-with-wordpress
..and it will also be: http://iestyn.net/wp/?p=290
Ok, so that’s 27 characters vs 25 for a tinyurl, and less should I want to alter some URL rewriting (which I’ll do soon). Not bad, and I’ve just saved my own tiny piece of the internets.
[Blog] iestyn.net: Short URLs with Wordpress http://bit.ly/Sgfth
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
G’day,
rev=canonical is a notoriously bad idea and I’m disappointed that its promoters are still flogging it. There is no need whatsoever to mess with canonical URLs and doing so can kill your search engine rankings… for example by installing this plugin you are now claiming that both http://www.iestyn.net/wp/2009/04/07/short-urls-with-wordpress and http://www.iestyn.net/wp/?p=290 are canonical URLs, which clearly they are not. Mix up rel and rev and you’re in for even more trouble, not to mention that rev is deprecated.
If you want a clean, standards compliant alternative then check out shortlink and the corresponding Wordpress plugin.
Sam