Base64 Shortlinks

The default WordPress “shortlink” URLs look like this: http://www.example.com/blog/?p=123, where “123” is actually a 7+ digit decimal number. This plugin shrinks your shortlinks by encoding that number into only 4 characters, and using the abbreviated URL prefix of your choice.

On my site, the default shortlinks are 35 bytes long, even though I have a very short domain name. This plugin shrinks them to 21 total bytes, which is comparable to most public URL-shortener services, and better than many.

E.g., this: http://www.jwz.org/blog/?p=13240780
becomes: http://jwz.org/b/ygnM

This doesn’t affect your (long) permalinks: those can still be in whatever format you like.