Check out this address:
If you visit it, you’ll end up right back here. The nice thing about it is that it’s a short link, about 70% smaller than the permalink for this post. URL shorteners are nothing new, Tiny URL has been around for 100 years, but WP.me is different in a few ways.
- WP.me is the only two-letter .me domain in the world.
- Every blog and post on WordPress.com has a WP.me URL now.
- These are all exposed in the <head> using rel=shortlink.
- It doesn’t work for any URL in the world, just WP.com-hosted ones.
- The links are permanent, they will work as long as WordPress.com is around.
- WP.me is spam-free, because we are constantly monitoring and removing spam from WP.com.
I think a few of these points are worth following up on. While URL shorteners have had some incredible usage tied to the growth (and constraints) of Twitter, I question their sustainability as a business. This point was underscored a few days ago when a popular one, tr.im, announced they were going to shut down at the end of the year.
Their story had a happy ending in that someone came in and saved them, but it was hard not to think of what would have happened if all their links stopped redirecting one day: part of the web would go dark. I also worry that because shorteners are essentially open proxies of HTTP they’ll be exploited by spammers and malware distributors to the point where businesses, anti-phishing, and anti-virus services will be forced to block them.
WordPress links have the structure they do, which is longer, because they’re meant to be permanent and portable. (And of course friendly to search engines.) Even if you weren’t using WordPress, the links contain no arbitrary IDs or other platform-specific implementation cruft so they should be trivial to serve from any system, even if you don’t use WordPress in the future. But if all the links to you use a shorter version, that sort of defeats the point!
But as Dave Winer articulated, there’s no reason we shouldn’t have a shortener ourselves, and here we are.
People are already using it.
How can you use it?
There is now a “Get Shortlink” button next to your permalink when you edit or write a post, and when you click it you’ll get a popup with the beautiful link already highlighted for your copy and pasting pleasure.
If you’re logged in you can also get the shortlink for any page on WordPress.com, there’s a link under the “Blog Info” menu in your admin bar.
Our thanks also go out to our friends at GoDaddy and in Montenegro for help with the domain.
Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)
WP.me — shorten your links
What to Pray for a New President
What to Pray for a New President Seeking God’s blessing for a pluralistic, conflicted, and divided nation. by Mark Labberton
There is no better time to renew our commitment to pray for our leaders than the start of a new presidential administration. Barack Obama needs our prayers and we should give them freely and eagerly no matter how we may have voted. I know our president needs prayer, because I know I do. My own life and pastoral leadership depends on prayer. I am aware that much of the blessing in the life of our church unfolds because of the prayers of people united in seeking God’s way. Blessings are not earned by prayer, nor should blessings be presumed because of prayer. But I do believe prayer increases our readiness to live humbly, wisely, and courageously.
These are also the qualities our new president needs. After a divisive campaign, an extraordinary economic collapse, a period of ecological vulnerability, and a time of war and global instability, our president and our nation need humility, wisdom, and courage. Wherever we or our congregations may be politically, these three qualities should guide our prayers for the leaders responsible for our nation and our world. Leadership that is lacking in any of these three will be far less constructive than these trying times demand. Our president needs the humility to live and lead in dependence upon God, practicing a clear estimate of our human and national limitations. Few qualities are more characteristic of Jesus than his willingness to serve in dependency on the Father, “emptying himself and taking the form of a servant.” Humble servant leadership is the essence of Jesus’ power. Let’s pray that as a new season of presidential leadership begins, Barack Obama will live before God with a clarified awareness of who he is and who he is not. When we lead our people to pray for our national leaders, we are praying for them to be wise. That means that they will be men and women led by the truth, who will act with discernment and justice. We may be tempted to pray that certain policies or political ideologies are enacted by the government, or for the authorities to establish our own utopian vision. This kind of prayer mistakenly treats the United States as a theocracy. Instead, we should be praying for leaders to have the wisdom to seek the shalom of the city, country, and world. This kind of prayer asks God to grant leaders the power and authority that allows people and communities to thrive. It is a prayer that neither over-reaches nor under-reaches. When we lead our people to pray for this new administration, we also need to pray that President Obama, and everyone in government, will have courage.
Given the social, economic, environmental, and security threats today, we could accumulate a pile of fear-inducing situations to rival Everest. This is an exceptional time, when our leadership needs the strength of character and will to seek, say, and do what is right. When we pray for a pluralistic, conflicted, and divided nation like our own, we should recognize that we are not just praying for the church, for the community of God’s people. Instead, we are stepping into our role as faithful exiles, surrounded by a widely varied people, who seek God’s life-giving love, mercy, and justice, especially for the marginalized and for our enemies. We cry out to God for his shalom to be poured out upon others. That will be the evidence to the world that the blessing we seek isn’t just for ourselves, but that we truly care for all peoples, tribes, and nations. When we pray for these things—humility, wisdom, and courage—we are stepping beyond our own party affiliation or preference, beyond the bickering of the campaign, beyond the places where divisions are real and substantial. We are seeking instead to be prayerful partners of God’s shalom that comes, at least in part, through governments, civic leaders, and even presidents.
Mark Labberton is pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Berkeley, California.
Posted via email from sawagner30′s posterous
Interesting Analysis by Wesley Pruden
PRUDEN: A game-changer by Obama
Wesley Pruden
ANALYSIS/OPINION:
If your toilet is stopped up by something really big and smells really bad, you’ll probably need a plumber. Joe the Plumber, as it turns out, diagnosed the trouble, and yesterday we learned what it was. It smells really bad.
The tape recording of an interview that Barack Obama gave to Radio Station WBEZ in Chicago in 2001 surfaced, and in that interview Mr. Obama, then a law professor and a state senator, lays out how he would redistribute the wealth. He sounds like a man with a plan.
The interview explains a lot, beginning with the attempt, abetted by a mainstream media that no longer tries to hide its slavish obeisance to the Democratic campaign, to destroy Joe the Plumber and shut down discussion of the implications of what the candidate said.
Mr. Obama doesn’t think much of the Constitution, or even of the Supreme Court justices who have rewritten it over the years to accommodate notions of “social justice.” The Warren Court, which wrote finis to public-school segregation with its unanimous Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, has been decried since as radical, but it wasn’t radical enough. Earl Warren only pretended to be a soldier of the revolution.
One of the “tragedies of the civil-rights movement,” Mr. Obama says, is that the Supreme Court did not address redistribution of wealth, probably because of the inherent difficulty of achieving such goals through the courts. The Supreme Court did not break from the restraints of the Constitution and “we still suffer from that.” Mr. Obama is not “optimistic” that the Supreme Court can achieve redistribution of wealth – of taking from the workers to give to the deadbeats – but he obviously thinks he knows how to do it. A president with a compliant Congress, which he expects to be in January, can do it through legislation and “administration.”
The Barack Obama of this interview clearly does not think much of what the Founding Fathers bequeathed to us: “The Constitution reflected the enormous blind spot in this culture that carries on to this day. The framers had that same blind spot … the fundamental flaw of this country.”
Mr. Obama is a gifted politician, with the smarts to understand that this could be the “game-changer” that leaves his campaign, almost picture-perfect until now, in ruins. He understands that he has to fly under the radar for now. That’s why his campaign apparatus moves swiftly to dismiss questions about the Obama paper trail, such as it is, and to crush anyone bold and foolish enough to inquire into the real Barack Obama.
Joe the Plumber learned the hard way what happens to such questioners, and when a television reporter in Florida asked Joe Biden whether his running mate is a Marxist economist, good old Joe, usually eager to talk about everything, acted as if the interviewer had accused him of serial killing or child molesting. Some things just aren’t to be talked about, not now. Not Barack Obama’s radical notions about redistributing the wealth – which is, after all, the essence of Marxism. Not about how he intends to replace fundamental American values with values that most Americans, if they knew about them, would regard as alien and hostile.
If John McCain wants to change the game over the next seven days, he’ll have to break through the media screen to spell out, clearly, often and in detail, the implications of what Barack Obama actually means when he talks about how to redistribute the wealth. To redistribute wealth, you first have to confiscate it from those who earned it with hard work, and the way to do that is with confiscatory taxes. Then you give it to those who didn’t earn it. Such explanations, made with cool detachment, once would have been the work of the newspapers and even the television networks. But not this year. Mr. McCain can expect real grief from the media when the polls tighten.
There’s nothing ambiguous about Mr. Obama’s radical views, as revealed in this interview. He clearly thinks the Constitution was a “tragedy,” that the men who wrote it were not the revolutionary heroes plain Americans regard them to be, and their work must be corrected by the surviving radicals of the ’60s and their progeny. Anyone who listens to this interview, available on YouTube.com, understands why Michelle Obama was never proud of her country until she thought the opportunity was at hand to destroy the country to save it, and why Barack Obama could spend 20 years comfortably listening to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright exhort God to damn America.
Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.
– Scott
We can only LIVESTRONG™ if we’re GODSTRONG™.
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