blog.eliduke.com

Maybe this is old news y’all, but I just stumbled onto it.

Recently I’ve become aware of the limitations of shortened urls (bit.ly, tr.im, etc), in that you have no idea where you’re clicking to, and if one of those services goes down, then all your links go down with it. In that regard, I started searching around to see if wordpress.com had any sort of built-in url shortening (like flic.kr does). My searches didn’t really find anything, so I started playing around on my own.

It was then, that I truly found what I was looking for.

Let’s use the following url as an example.

http://elisfanclub.com/2009/05/30/444-miles-to-denver

First I tried removing all the date nonsense:

http://elisfanclub.com/444-miles-to-denver

and (as expected) that worked just fine. But even then, when I tried posting that url to Twitter, it automatically got shortened to a bit.ly link. I needed something even shorter, but I didn’t want to have to start adjusting the slugs on my posts.

Then, in a moment of genius, I tried the following url:

http://elisfanclub.com/444

and it worked! I couldn’t believe it. Had I done something unintentionally to make that work? Had I actually changed the slug on that post without realizing? What the heck was going on?

I started scanning my recent posts and trying out different things:

http://elisfanclub.com/2009/05/24/if-you-are-only-skeptical

That link can also be written as:

http://elisfanclub.com/if

This link:

http://elisfanclub.com/2009/04/23/a-comprehensive-revision-of-lifestyle/

can also be written as:

http://elisfanclub.com/a

I was really on to something! Apparently, wordpress.com does some sort of a quick search through your posts and finds a post that begins with those characters. I kept going down the list of my posts to see what happened. Further on down the line I found this one:

http://elisfanclub.com/2009/02/22/im-not-a-tourist-anymore/

But when I went here:

http://elisfanclub.com/im

It went here instead:

http://elisfanclub.com/2008/10/19/im-back-in-antarctica/

I think that it finds the earliest post that begins with those characters. So in order to get to the “I’m not a tourist anymore” post, I had to go here:

http://elisfanclub.com/im-n

And to get to the “I’m Back in Antarctica” post I had to go here:

http://elisfanclub.com/im-b

Just to make sure that this wasn’t some sort of crazy nonsense that I was making up in my brain, I tried this out on my friend Shane’s Blog. Recently he’s been writing a lot about his run in with the police regarding a photo he took of an ATM in an REI. If I go here:

http://iamshane.com/rei

it takes me to the earliest post who’s title begins with REI. But he’s got 2 posts like that, right in a row. So, you need to specify even further, like this:

http://iamshane.com/rei-b

or this:

http://iamshane.com/rei-a

Again, maybe this is old news, but I thought that maybe the next time someone tries searching for “wordpress.com short urls” they might find the answers here.