Spent a frustrating couple of hours yesterday installing YOURLS onto my website, although the end result was actually quite satisfying. YOURLS is a PHP based URL shortener (along the lines of bit.ly and tinyurl) that can be installed on any webserver running PHP. The installation itself should be straightforward, but I was using Softaculous (provided on my webhost, which is usually hassle free) and it was getting confused about me wanting to install it in a subdomain rather than under my root domain name. Eventually I did a manual installation and it all started working perfectly!
So now every post is assigned an automatic shortened URL, for example, my recent post on stick insects can be reached from http://go.dave-wood.org/c. Specific labels can also be added, so my page on Insect Locomotion is http://go.dave-wood.org/gaits as well as http://blog.dave-wood.org/maths/insect-locomotion/. I’ve also installed the YOURLS WordPress to Twitter plugin so now an automatic notification is sent to my twitter feed when I publish a new post. Not sure how well that’s going to work yet, so watch this space (hopefully something won’t go wrong and start spamming Twitter).
Haven’t worked out if it’s possible to display a post’s shortened URL in the post yet, it seems like a sensible thing to do so will look into that. Update: have now worked it out!
