Whomwah.com

I’ve made a few updates to the RevCanonical Wordpress plugin I built. These updates add a bit of extra functionality, and also allowed me to tidy up the documentation, so that people know what they’re getting.

First update, is the ability to customise how the link tag is constructed within the head of your page. This is due to the large amount of people who have contacted me, asking why I choose to use rev=canonical and not rel= shorturl, rel=shorturl or rel=short_url etc. As I told them, the reason I chose rev=canonical was to be honest simply because I liked it, and many of my peers were already using this method on their sites. Simple.

So currently with the plugin you get this out of the box:

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

but you could customise it to be like this:

<link rel="shorturl" href="http://y-doma.in/p12p" />

The reason for this extra customisation is to try and stop people being distracted by the what attribute should I use conversation, and start getting them hosting their own short links they can use. This at least starts solving one problem. When a general consensus, or in deed a standard appears about the attributes, you can simple update and you’re good-to-go.

At the moment the only place you can see the shortened url is either by looking in the source, or using a bookmarklet like the one Simon wrote. I guess I could of injected the url into the admin interface somewhere, but I generally don’t want to see it. The idea is, it’s there for machines to see if they need to, and if I really need to pass it around I’ll just use the bookmarklet.

If you want more flexibility, I have added a of a couple of tags you can use in your templates. These simply let you display the shortened url for a specific post.

# echo the shortened url to the screen
<?php get_revcanonical_shorturl($post_id); ?>
 
# assign the shortened url to a variable
<?php $url = revcanonical_shorturl($post_id); ?>

Oh and finally, just a reminder that this plugin plays well with the TweetMe plugin I wrote that tweets to Twitter.com when you publish a post, and will check to see if you have the RevCanonical plugin installed. If you do, it will use your own shortened url instead of the bit.ly version.

UPDATE [15:06 April 14th 2009]

Revcanonical is a Wordpress plugin that creates localised shortened urls, and adds support for the rev=canonical link tag.

Revcanonical came about after seeing a post on Mr Willison’s website a few days ago. I’d seen mutterings around the web from Joshua Schachter, Dave Winer and Chris Shiflett about how url shortening services are not great for the web for amongst many reasons, the persistence of the link becomes questionable, because you are relying on that service actually being around in 20 years.

It seems that clever people have taken the conversation further and have actually started to come up with possible solutions. One such solution is rev= canonical, and is the one I liked and hence wanted to implement into my site. In fact, some of the big players have already added rev=canonical to their sites. Flickr, Dopplr and php.net already have pages that use it and there’s even a rev= canonical web service. That’s millions of pages already out there.

By default, once you install the plugin to your Wordpress blog, you will get a tag added to the source of your page that will contain a shortened version of the url for the page it sits in.

<link rev="canonical" type="text/html" href="http://whomwah.com/p12p" />

That’s it! You can now, not only use this url 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. For example, Simon has build a great bookmarklet that does just this. You can use it when you are on a url you’d like to share. It will return the shortened version of the url if it’s available, otherwise it will use a shortening service as a last resort. This means that if I go to this page:

http://whomwah.com/2009/04/14/revcanonical-a-revcanonical-wordpress-plugin

And I want to share this link on Twitter for example. The bookmarklet would see I have implemented rev=canonical and would fetch the shortened url.

http://whomwah.com/p136

In fact, you would in reality get this:

http://littl.me/p136

as the plugin allows you to add your own shortened domain (and I bought one). It’s up to you though point this new domain to the right place.

So, this means that I still get a short url to share, that works on my website, but also means that it’s persistence is down to me, and not to a 3rd party. It also means that if people to http://littl.me, it redirects to my website, so hopefully there’s a little more trust in the shortened url final destination.

Some final tech bits. It uses a base36 encoded post ID (made sense and was simple to implement) in the shortened url with the letter p to namespace. It also creates a 301 as the general consensus agreed.

Oh and if you use the TweetMe plugin I wrote then I’m just in the process of deploying a new version that will use your localised shortened link if it’s available.

[UPDATE] I’m getting lots of people asking why I went for rev=canonical and not rel=shortlink etc. The truth is no particular reason, other than more people I knew and trusted have gone for the former. There appears to be no definitive correct way yet as far as I can see, so until there is I’ll have to make an executive choice.

[UPDATE] If you install my new revcanonical plugin, then TweetMe will use auto generated short urls from your own website, instead of going to a 3rd party site.

I’ve written a simple little Wordpress Plugin to get me moving again. TweetMe posts a tweet to Twitter when you publish a blog post.

If you do a search on Google there are loads of similar plugins out there. The problem is after trying a few, none of them did what I wanted, and many of them seemed far to complex for the task in hand. I simply wanted this. Nothing more, nothing less:

• I enter my Twitter credentials once and they get validated.
• I decide how I want my tweet to look.
• When I publish a new blog post, it gets sent to Twitter.
• If I update that post, I don’t want it resent, unless I choose.
• That’s it….

So that’s all TweetMe does.

• Visit the TweetMe project page
• Download TweetMe from wordpress.org