If you were on the web long enough you’ll remember we went through the ugly URL to clean “pretty” URL stage. Instead of long database query URLs, eventually content management systems allowed clean URLs that usually matched the title. A big improvement.

Then came Twitter and the 140 character limit. The clean URLs were much too long. A flurry of short URL services popped up. I never liked them and contacted Twitter about them auto-converting URLs when I was within my 140 character restriction. I never received a response but read in multiple places Twitter converts URLs if they are over 30 characters long.

I started thinking about the history of new things online. A bunch of them pop up, a bunch of them hail. Most of them do. What happens to my links when these services go out of business? They die. I rarely link to my own articles but others do and their link would die. I didn’t like that.

I’m using WordPress and I decided to create my own short URLs. Why not take control of the situation and make it so people don’t have to shorten my URLs? I’m blessed to have a pretty short domain and I can get my URLs under 30 characters. There was just one factor stopping me…I became used to my links being made from the title. Then I thought about how often I actually used a URL on my site (or anyone else’s for that matter) to find an article. Almost never, it is very rare. I search instead. Isn’t that what most people do?

I’m going to try using short URLs. The beautiful thing about WordPress is that it has an automatic redirecting solution in it. My URLs usually are like this:

http://tymesaid.com/2009/title

I condensed it to this:

http://tymesaid.com/2009/a28n

But if I type this in the browser it redirects automatically:

http://tymesaid.com/a28n

I strongly suggest if you have the ability to make your own short URLs, to do so. Take control of the situation and have people come straight to your site – instead of using a third party.