Shorter is better, and short URLs, like http://bit.ly, are all the rage these days. With good reason. You can remember something short, text it, tweet it, share it, all much faster than you can remember something like http://jorjafox.net/2012/jfo4-us-is-live/
There are a bunch of great tools for handling this. In fact, WordPress (which I use here) has a plugin called Jetpack that will use wp.me URLs for any post. But. Well, I like ‘owning’ my own stuff, so after a little work, I bought a short domain.
Now if you notice, the site just has a list of links. Nothing fancy, right? All those links are acutally to shorter URLs. Like http://jfo4.us/2 goes to the post about
“Willows in the Wind” Promotional Photos – Yeah, that teeny URL kicks you over to the big one. And then there’s the cool part about how I can name them whatever I want. So if I go to http://jfo4.us/com you go to http://jorjafox.com! Okay, perhaps a bad example, since that’s easy to remember too.
List of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation episodes on the JorjaPedia though, has a pretty simple, if long, URL, with a colon in it that I, who wrote the thing, always forget. http://jorjafox.net/wiki/List_of_CSI:_Crime_Scene_Investigation_episodes is annoying, right? http://jfo4.us/csieps is not. Suddenly you see the point.
By default, you’ll see them now on all the posts here. I’m going to see about rolling them out to the Wiki and Gallery, so everyone can grab short URLs if they want them. Until then, if there are long URL’d pages that need a short URL, I can make them manually.