Base64 Shortlinks

The default WordPress “shortlink” URLs look like this: http://www.example.com/blog/?p=123, where “123” is actually a 7+ digit decimal number. This plugin shrinks your shortlinks by encoding that number into only 4 characters, and using the abbreviated URL prefix of your choice.

On my site, the default shortlinks are 35 bytes long, even though I have a very short domain name. This plugin shrinks them to 21 total bytes, which is comparable to most public URL-shortener services, and better than many.

E.g., this: http://www.jwz.org/blog/?p=13240780
becomes: http://jwz.org/b/ygnM

This doesn’t affect your (long) permalinks: those can still be in whatever format you like.

1. Upload the base64-shortlinks directory to your /wp-content/plugins/ directory.
2. Activate the plugin through the “Plugins” menu in WordPress.
3. Select the “Base64 Shortlinks” menu under “Settings” and enter your Shortlink URL Prefix.

1.0

• Created

1.1

• Shortlinks that happened to have “-” in them were failing. Fixed.

1.2

• Fixed a bug that affected blogs installed in the root directory of their site.

1.3

• Fixed a bug that caused shortlinks to be longer than necessary on 32-bit systems.

1.4

• Fix for WordPress 4.0.

1.5

• Eliminated some PHP warnings.

1.6

• Don’t use PHP short-open tags.

1.7

• Added base64-redir-quick.php for those with performance concerns.