Just noticed a feature on my WordPress.com blog that I’m not sure if it has been there before or not! The feature in question is the WordPress In-built URL Shortener…WP.ME
And no, I’m not talking about the URL shortening of the kind that WP does with blog surfer – the one where post links are given as https://ychittaranjan.wordpress.com/?p=2155, the number after p usually the Post Id.
The one I noticed was built into the edit post page wherein one can edit the permalink of an older post. There is a new button there that will generate a new shortlink for your post – one in the form of http://wp.me/p4bL-yL
Nifty, no? Here’s how you can do it too…
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Login to your WordPress Dashboard and navigate to the Posts section.
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Click on the edit link for an existing post
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Once the edit post page opens up, notice the new button beside the Permalink editor
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Click on the Get Shortlink button and voila! WP will give you your post’s shortlink
Copy this link and tweet away! After all, the most common place to use the shortlinks are on twitter 
Few drawbacks though…at 20 characters long, the shortened URL is still not as short enough as something, say, is.gd or u.nu would have generated (18 and 16 characters, respectively). Secondly, it seems to work only for existing blog posts and clearly is not a service which can be used like a normal URL shortener. You know, copy-paste a really long URL and come up with a tiny one.
Anyways its still early days for it (I surely think so…if its been there for a while, please lemme know 😳 ) and the geniuses at Automattic will surely devise ways and means to spruce it up further.
P.S: Apologies if the how-to sounded rather rambling. Force of habit y’see…(from drawing up bug reports for dummies…err…developers since years) 😛
My Wierd Wired World 
But would we need that shortening service, since twitter does it automatically, aint it?
Well, you can use that…or use this one which is closed to you. Post something, grab the shortlink and share it….on Twitter or on Gtalk/YM status or anyplace else…
am used to tinyurl.
is.gd for me. Use it via FF add-on.
you are fast, I read you post first and then the announcement 🙂 – http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2009/08/14/shorten/
😎
and it is not good to take potshots at developers 😛 .. anyway the developers would be taking potshots at you for revenge, so carry on! 😀
again, 😎
P.S: Do u belong to the dev ilk? 😯
yeah, I do 🙂
Thanks for that.
I kinda agree with Poonam
Hi..
Thanks for info
i wanted to know if there is some way,such that i write something in address bar of a browser,and that takes me directly to the shortlink of the latest post?
or something i write in address_bar that can takes me directly to the permalink of the latest post
erm…didn’t quite get what you’re trying to say! 😐
Shortlinks are generated for an already-posted blogpost so that you can go to that post without having to type the entire permalink.
Yes, i want to directly access a post from a permalink,
for example
a post with permalink has following format
http://www.example.com/2005/1/15/thisIsNewPost
i want to write something after ‘www.example.com/2005/1/15/’ in the “address_bar” of browser such that i directly go to
‘www.example.com/2005/1/15/thisIsNewPost’ ,which is the permalink
what should i write after ‘www.example.com/2005/1/15/’ to go directly to the permalink of the new post/latest article_of the day,i normally use chrome
AFAIK there’s nothing that will help you to “guess” the permalink of a blog post by just using the blog URL 🙄
A Shortlink will have the ENTIRE permalink in it…you can’t create a shortlink that can be a substitute for just the ‘post slug’. As I understand, if you want to access the blog post of http://www.example.com/2005/1/15/ThisIsANewLongPostThatIwroteToday, you want to have something of a shortcode like http://www.example.com/2005/1/15/abc that will take you to the original post?
An alternative would be to use the post ID, as I explained in the above post. Use http://www.example.com/?p=123 but of course, you would have to know the post id
Also, If you just enter http://www.example.com/2005/1/15/ and hit the return key, you will see the posts made on that date and if there’s only one, you ca directly go to it. Does that make sense?
Hi thanks for ur response,
you r right about post id
let me explain this way
if u see the page source in chrome,u will see that post id is present in a variable say “PostID” and permalink is present in a variable say “Permanlink”
is there someway i can use these variables in address bar such that values(strings) which these variables have get substituted,
hence for example
i write something like
http://www.example.com/2005/1/15/$PostID
or
http://www.example.com/2005/1/15/&Permalink
,where PostID contains the postid or permalink contain the permanent link of the post
such that i can go directly to the latest post,in one go..
thanks a lot in advance
waiting eagerly for a +ve response
with regards to your comment
“Also, If you just enter http://www.example.com/2005/1/15/ and hit the return key, you will see the posts made on that date and if there’s only one, you ca directly go to it. Does that make sense?”
i absolutely agree,thats what i have been doing uptil now
But my aim is to go directly,so that i avoid this method altogether..
i still need to go to http://www.example.com/2005/1/15/ and then click the latest post for that date,
i dont want to do this,i want to just go directly and avoid this extra step of clicking on the latest post for that day,after going to http://www.example.com/2005/1/15/
I hope i have not confused u
thanks in advance,waiting eagerly for ur response
hi chittaranjan..ru there..
my 2 posts are in moderation
I think I’m getting what you’re trying to say…..but each post will have a unique $PostId and there is no way that your browser can know which variable belongs to which post….that is something that WordPress controls at their end.
Maybe if there was a unique way of assigning post ids, say all posts in Category 1 would be assigned post ids as 1_XX where XX is the number of posts in that category. In that case, if you wanted to go to the 2nd post in that category, you would use example.com/?p=1_02
Hi chittaranjan
thanks for ur reply
the blog will have only one post per day
for example,consider this following blog which actually exists
http://arsespeak.com/2009/12/15/
if u see that it lists a single daily post which when clicked upon goes to the permalink
http://arsespeak.com/2009/12/15/walcott-arsenal-still-capable-of-title-challenge/
if u see the pagesource of that u will see the postid as Just a number “1387′, this number doesnot increment by one,for every day in wordpress.
but u know that in wordpress
there r 3 ways of connecting to the latest post directly
1)permalink
2)post id
3)shortlink
they are all unique,and have only ONE VALUES for that DATE on which it is posted,and it is ONLY A SINGLE POST FOR THAT DATE
is there someway we can call any of these variables in a browsers addressbar,such that we can go “directly” to the latest post.,BUT WITHOUT reading the page source..
if not in addressbar…some batch file is needed.?
I hope we can do call any of these variables from the address bar of chrome browser such that we go directly to the latest post,but without reading the page source
i am trying all sorts of ways,syntaxes,but been unsuccessful
hoping for a positive response
thanks a lot in advance
my new comment is in moderation? help
“if u see the pagesource of that u will see the postid as Just a number “1387′, this number doesnot increment by one,for every day in wordpress.”
The number DOES increment. If you save multiple drafts of the same post, each will have an incremented number.
Say, if you post a post directly, it will have post id as 100, if yiu edit it once, the post id of the edited post will be 101 and each subsequent edits will have a +1 post id.
If the posts on a blog are un-edited, each post will have serial order of post ids 🙂
And for the Arsespeak blog u posted, post ids of 1385 & 1386 lead to same post and 1383 & 1384 also lead to the same post.
So you see with the post id NOT being unique for each post, there can never be a variable that you can call to get the blog post.
Only the Shortlink and Permalink are constant and you cannot get those as well using a variable or any special syntax
Just can’t be done 😐
I suppose you can get rid of a couple of characters by removing “http://”. Afterall, the browser does this for you and redirects accordingly automattically, no?