I’d probably care more if I dropped links to my blogging into twitter. The idea of pushing masked links to my own thing just strikes me as dirty. Like self-seeding Reddit. (No offense to those of you who do that — your posts are probably more awesome than mine) Or rickrolling pals. But, without the humor.

Regardless of my personal use, though, I think it’s time we get our permalinks shorter than 30 characters. We could even keep the out-of-control keyword stuffing in place for search engine indexing and just 301 the short ones to the longer ones. In other words, this post could be http://aaronmentele.com/p/793 and everyone on twitter would know if I was link spamming my own stuff. Google, though, would see it at http://aaronmentele.com/2009/07/17/shorter-urls/ and give me a sooper rank on the phrase.

We could all push whatever we wanted and not feel dirty. Our clients could link to themselves and reinforce their TLDs without loosing search traffic. Nobody would be left guessing.

It took two lines in the .htaccess file to do it here and on the EP site.

RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^p/([0-9]+)/?$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}/?p=$1 [R=301,L]

I’d love to hear if anyone has a better idea. But you don’t have to look far to see there are other reasons to get URL management figured out. Right?

UPDATE: I see now that Zeldman has a recent post on the topic. At quick glance, the plugin he’s using seems to require manual set up for each link, and that’s probably more additional effort than I’m willing to give my modest posts. Also, I realize this whole idea isn’t new idea or unique. I’m sure smarter people than me have said these things long ago. And, finally, thanks to Michael for straightening me out on the rewrite above. That was embarrassing.