Brian Teeman

With the rise of twitter we are seeing a rapid increase in the usage of short urls (sURLS).

I use a sURL whenever I tweet a new blog post and also if I need to place a url in a powerpoint presentation.

In theory these are a great method of providing short, quick and permanent links to important content.

Sadly they are also often used to disguise the domain until after you have clicked on it.

What is a sURL?

The idea is that you can create a very short permanent url to any web link. All of the following examples link to this blog post

1. http://tr.im/yGnH
2. http://bit.ly/wlQKG
3. http://tinyurl.com/qud4rj
4. http://cli.gs/BjUyvV

But last month I had a panic when tr.im announced that they were closing shop, and that every tr.im sURL I had used in a presentation would soon stop working. (Note they have since changed their mind - for now at least).

This was going to mean that I would need to trawl through all my presentations and change the urls and I was bound to forget one or two. Plus there were bound to be people who had local copies of the presentation that I would not be able to change.

A second issue I have found with using a sURL is that the reader doesn't immediately know whose site it is that is being linked to. Yes I know some twitter clients will decrypt the sURL onhover but as previously stated twitter is not the only place that a sURL is useful.

So can you as a reader automatically trust a sURL before clicking on it. I'm seeing more and more people using sURLS to trick me into clicking on a site I would not knowing have visited otherwise. Your domain has built in trust with it's readers so surely a sURL from your domain has more authority than a third party sURL.

What I really need is a means of

1. Creating a sURL that is in my control eg won't disappear at any time in the future
2. Creating a sURL that is readily identifiable as belonging to my web site

Obviously I need an easy solution, one that is permanent, fully under my control and native to joomla.

I had a quick look around and found a simple but effective sURL generator for Joomla from jfoobar.org

This plugin will create a sURL from the article id e.g. http://www.mydomain.com/tiny-999. It's quick and easy but is obviously limited to work only with articles. (There might also be an issue with linking to the correct site layout as well as there is no ItemID involved - I've not checked this)

I want, no need, the flexibility to be able to create a sURL to any page on my site irrespective of wether it is a content item, an eventlist view or even a JCal Pro event.

Back to the drawing board and back to google to search for a more appropriate solution to my needs.

As so often happens my need for a sURL got pushed to the bottom of the TODO list.

Roll forward a few weeks and I was chatting to Yannick Gaultier of sh404SEF fame over skype. We had one of those conversations that I both love and hate in equal proportions

1. B: Yannick wouldn't it be great if you added sURL support to sh404SEF
2. Y: It's already there!!!!
3. B: Really?
4. Y: Yes it's called Alias

Typical here I was thinking I was going to have to install another extension to my sites and it was installed all the time.

Now creating my own sURL for any page of my site is as simple as 1, 2 and 3

1. 1. Open sh404sef and click "View/Edit SEF Urls"
2. 2. Locate the url I wanted to create a sURL for
3. 3. Create an alias (sURL) for that url (You can create more than one alias (sURL) if you want to)

How easy was that? Now I have my own authoritative and permanent sURL service, independent on any third party service.

As a bonus they don't have to be cryptic either. So they pass my http://brian.teeman.net/hef test as well.

The sURL for this blog post is http://brian.teeman.net/surl