Description
Hum is a personal URL shortener for WordPress, designed to provide short URLs to your personal content, both hosted on WordPress and elsewhere. For example, rather than a long URL for a WordPress post such as https://willnorris.com/2011/01/hum-personal-url-shortener-wordpress, you could have a short URL like https://willnorris.com/b/FJ. Additionally, if you have a custom domain for short URLs, you can shorten things further like https://wjn.me/b/FJ. Once the plugin is enabled, the shortlink for a page or post can be found in the “Shortlink” item in the WordPress Admin Bar.
WordPress post IDs are shortened using the NewBase60 encoding scheme which is specifically optimized for brevity and readability, with built-in error correction for commonly confused characters like ‘1’, ‘l’, and ‘I’.
Hum is not designed as a general purpose URL shortener along the lines of https://bit.ly or https://goo.gl. Rather, it is specifically intended as a personal shortener for your own content.
Read more about the reasoning for a personal URL shortener at Tantek Celik‘s page for Whistle, which served as the inspiration for Hum.
Developer Documentation
Adding your Amazon Affiliate ID
If you’d like to include your Amazone Affiliate ID in the /i/ redirect URLs, implement the amazon_affiliate_id filter. For example:
add_filter('amazon_affiliate_id', fn() => "willnorris-20");
Additional Local Types
Out of the box, Hum only registers the b, t, a and p prefix to be served locally by WordPress. If you would like to register additional prefixes, implement the hum_local_types filter. For example, to include ‘p’ as well for photos:
function myplugin_hum_local_types( $types ) {
$types[] = 'p';
return $types;
}
add_filter('hum_local_types', 'myplugin_hum_local_types');
This will tell Hum to serve any /p/{id} URLs from WordPress. Additionally, you’ll want to instruct Hum to use your prefix for that particular content type. Here, we’re registering ‘p’ which is normally used for photos.
function myplugin_hum_type_prefix( $prefix, $post_id ) {
$post = get_post( $post_id );
if ( $post->post_type ## 'attachment' &&
strpos($post->post_mime_type, 'image') =## 0 ) {
$prefix = 'p';
}
return $prefix;
}
add_filter('hum_type_prefix', 'myplugin_hum_type_prefix', 10, 2);
Simple Redirect
You can redirect all traffic for a prefix using a single line of PHP my implementing the hum_redirect_base_{type} filter where {type} is the prefix to redirect. For example, I redirect all /w/ URLs to wiki.willnorris.com using:
add_filter('hum_redirect_base_w', fn() => "https://wiki.willnorris.com/");
Installation
Follow the normal instructions for installing WordPress plugins.
Using a custom domain
If you have a custom domain you’d like to use with Hum, add it as the ‘Shortlink Base (URL)’ on the ‘General Settings’ WordPress admin page or define the HUM_SHORTLINK_BASE constant in your wp-config.php:
define('HUM_SHORTLINK_BASE', 'https://wjn.me');
You will also need to setup your short domain to redirect to your normal domain. Many domain registrars provide free redirection services that work well for this, so you don’t need to setup a new domain with your web host. Just make sure that you are not using an iframe style redirect.
FAQ
-
What types of content does Hum support?
-
Out of the box, Hum will provide shortlinks for any content locally hosted on WordPress. Most shortlinks will use the
btype prefix, with the exception of posts with a ‘status’ post format, which have shortlinks using thettype prefix. For example:Additionally, the
itype prefix, along with one of four subtypes, is supported as follows:asinorafor Amazon ASIN numbersisbnorifor ISBN numbers
All
iURLs are redirected to Amazon.com. For example:Additional type prefixes can be registered to serve WordPress hosted content or to redirect to an external service. See more in the developer documentation.
Reviews
Contributors & Developers
“Hum” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
Contributors
“Hum” has been translated into 3 locales. Thank you to the translators for their contributions.
Translate “Hum” into your language.
Interested in development?
Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.
Changelog
Project maintined on github at willnorris/wordpress-hum.
1.3.5
- update JS dependencies and code
1.3.4
- fix broken
wp_get_shortlinkhook, when loaded in the frontend
1.3.3
- fix PHP warning in combination with widgets
1.3.2
- update documentation
1.3.1
- change the priority of the rewrite rules action
1.3.0
- redirect types are now also filterable
1.2.8
- add shortlink panel to block editor (props @florianbrinkmann)
1.2.7
- redirect only known types (see #wp180868)
1.2.6
- fix PHP 7.4 deprecation warning
- WordPress coding style changes
1.2.5
- add shortlink to post/page overview pages
1.2.4
- finally fixed “flush rewrite rules”
1.2.3
- fixed “flush rewrite rules”
1.2.2
- version bump
1.2.1
- add
amazon_domainfilter, to support different countries - add
hum_process_redirectaction, to overwrite default rewrite method (see #17)
1.2
- move link post format to use ‘t’ prefix instead of ‘h’ and add support for
image post format - add support for WordPress media attachments
- add shortlinks to Atom feeds
- add support for legacy short url schemes (see #6)
- switch to using WordPress filters instead of actions for hum extensions (see
#3)
1.1
- allow custom domain to be configured using
HUM_SHORTLINK_BASEconstant or
via the General Settings admin page. - strip some punctuation at the end of URLs (see #4)
- smarter URL matching (see #1 and #2)
- add support for
/i/URLs (redirects to Amazon for ASIN or ISBN
identifiers, optionally including an Amazon affiliate ID) - standard 404 handling if hum can’t find a proper redirect
- add new
hum_local_typesfilter for registering other prefixes thatt are
served locally by WordPress - reduce extra redirect for local content
1.0
- initial public release