I hate TinyURL.

I get really annoyed when people use TinyURL to point people to links online. I think it’s tacky for a business to rely on a separate service just for sending a single link – it’s like people that use AOL or Yahoo! for their businses email and not their own domain. Plus, how can you be sure a TinyURL you publish today will work tomorrow? We’re back to the whole reason for permalinks!
But I can’t get mad at the users, right? I get even more annoyed that we can’t use long links without some crappy email client chopping them in half. Why can’t it all just work!?
I had sent out some links to a blog post on a listserv and the listserv software hacked my links and a fellow list member TinyURLed my links and sent them on.
I started to think of how a blog tool could solve this problem.
In WordPress I added a quick line to my .htaccess file:
RewriteRule ^post/([0-9]+)?/?([0-9]+)?/?$ /index.php?p=$1&page=$2 [QSA]
This lets me call up a post by it’s post ID number. So my usually perfectly fine sensible elegant URL for post #256, ‘Search Engines, Blog Companies Join to Combat Comment Spam’
http://easybakeweblogs.com/2005/01/18/search-engines-blog-companies-join-to-combat-comment-spam/
Becomes:
http://easybakeweblogs.com/post/256
A lot easier to email, eh? I know some will wonder why I don’t just use that all the time – I like the longer URLs because you can see what exactly you’re linking to. I may in the future drop the year, month and date from the URLs because that doesn’t seem as relevant to this site.
I added this to the WordPress documentation but it’s still under review since it contains coding (and – ahem – I’m not a coder!).