rel_shortlink - Short-URLs for Joomla!

Zuletzt aktualisiert am Freitag, den 05. August 2011 um 18:48 Uhr Geschrieben von: flow Mittwoch, den 29. Juni 2011 um 15:11 Uhr

The rel=shortlink meta-tags are an effort to reduce the number of short URLs for the same page, and avoid what some call "the great linkrot apocalypse", as well as giving the website owner a certain degree of freedom as to what her shortlinks look like. Wordpress does use this approach for quite some time now, php.net too, and I figured it might be worthwhile for Joomla! as well.

Some URL-Shortening services (ok, actually I only know of this one) do what they call "Shortening that doesn't hurt the internet". They check for some meta-tags first to see if already another shortlink URL exists for a given page. mod_rel_shortlink is a simple Joomla! module that fetches a short URL for the page it is displayed on and sets either a rel=shortlink, rel=alternate shorter, or rev=canonical meta-tag.

It does this only for URLs which are longer than 17 characters because it doesn't make much sense to me to shorten a URL like, e.g., http://vaggi.de to http://tinyurl.com/iuuzet5 or so, and, in addition, some shortening services have such restrictions in place. The short URL may then be displayed in a module position using mootools to make for a slide effect. To reduce the load and number of http-request optionally the short-links may be written to a .txt-file.

When a page is then requested mod_rel_shortlink first looks through the saved short-links before it asks the URL shortening service. On huge sites this option should probably not be used but I guess you should just try it out to see what is faster and what works best for you.

Supported Services

mod_rel_shortlink currently supports the following link shortening and redirection services:

is.gd, ur.ly, goo.gl, bitly.com, snipr.com, yep.it, cli.gs, fwd4.me, migre.me, qr.cx, redir.ec, tinyurl.com, tinyarro.ws, clicky.me, linkx.me, g.vaggi.eu, tiny.cc, chilp.it, xr.com, adjix.com, urlBorg, lnk.co, BudURL.com, fon.gs, dlvr.it, x.nu, Local YOURLs Instance (not flawlessly working yet).

API

There is also a simple API included. If you save the Short-/Long-URL-Pairs to the file you may give other extension the chance to read that file and fetch a short-URL for, e.g. a Twitter button. To use the API include

'modules'.DS. 'mod_rel_shortlink'.DS.'shortlink_api.php';

and then call the method

tinyAPIShortURL::tinyAPIgetShortURL ($url);

to receive the short-URL. If there is a short-URL it will be returned in simple text format; if there is none the return string will be empty.

Installation

1. Download the .zip file.

2. Unzip it as it contains packages for both Joomla! 1.5 and 1.6.

3. Follow the Joomla! Standard installation procedure.

4. Publish it and adjust settings.

That's it.

Download

If you use re_shortlink please rate and review it in the Joomla! Extension Directory.

Changelog

v1.0 - June 2011

• Initial Release

Bugs / Feature

Please report any bugs and feature requests here >>.