URL Shortening

This post was written 2 years 1 month 28 days days old, so is a bit old now. Feel free to read and comment on this post, just remember some things change with time and any facts in this post may not be accurate anymore.

My Simple URL Shortening WordPress plugin is currently under-going a bit of a change! From a few of the most popular URL shortening services, it will soon be, from what I can tell, the most powerful shortening plugin available.

Let’s look at some stats.

I’ve looked at 380 URL shortening services. 67 have “gone to the wall” and 131 don’t appear to have an API (although I will be contacting them at a later time to confirm this). However, of the remaining, there are now 121 URL shortening services available via the plugin – this compares to the 25 that were originally available.

Oh, and I’m awaiting API details from a handful of providers.

Or, in graph form…

To achieve this, unlike previous versions of the plugin, I’ve had to read JSON and XML return files. Not a great issue, but it expands the code by quite a bit.

At the moment the plugin can only request short URLs via a GET, not a POST (and those that use the latter make up for a lot of the “Other” numbers). I’m sure I’ll add that feature in future!

I’m still testing the plugin, but it should be released soon.