Back in February, I posted about the hidden dangers behind shortened URLs. In the comments, David Needham mentioned the possibility of self-hosted URL shorteners to help make the process more trustworthy for users. To that end, I have some information to share from my latest project.

Dan Sebring for Congress was my first website built on WordPress 3.0, which released earlier this summer. While I was working on the project, I stumbled on a new feature of version 3.0. It appears that link shortening is now built into the software.

Clicking the “Get Shortlink” button brings up a dialog box with the shortened URL. Obviously, this will be less useful with a long domain name. However, if you have a short domain name and run WordPress on your site, replacing third-party URL shorteners like bit.ly with this self-hosted option could help increase visitors’ trust in your site.

This is a fairly basic and simple addition to WordPress 3.0, and as such, it has been overshadowed by some of the other new features. However, I think it is a great addition because it saves users additional steps needed for other self-hosted URL shortening solutions.