A shorter, meaningful URL to use in YouTube annotation links
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On YouTube Channels, we can have approved “associated websites” so that annotations in videos can link to sites external to YouTube. I have mapped a domain I own to my wordpress blog, and gotten that approved as an associated website on YouTube (thanks to some of your support pages).
Once you have an associated website on YouTube, you can also link to posts or pages deeper in your site. The full URL of those links appear on-screen in the video when people hover their mouse. I’d like a shorter URL to appear on-screen for one URL that is long. I’ve thought of several ways of making this happen, none of which seem easy or doable or desirable at this point, and I’m wondering if you have ways to accomplish some of my ideas or other better ideas.
Below, in no particular order, are the different possibilities I’ve considered and the issues with each. Do you know of ways to accomplish these, and/or other better options?
1) Use a wordpress shortlink for the page. Problem: when people read it in the video, it’s meaningless.
2) Use a subdomain that points to the longer URL. You have help pages about using subdomains on whole blogs or sites, but not about pointing to a long URL within an existing mapped domain. I tried setting up a subdomain with my registrar, but it’s not working, probably since the DNS for the primary domain is going to wordpress.com servers. I’ve considered changing the DNS for the subdomain to my other hosting company and then forwarding it back to the long URL on my wordpress.com site, but I don’t know if that would make YouTube think I’m cross-domain linking (since there would be two different IP addresses), and they don’t like cross-domain linking. Also, YouTube only allows one associated website, as far as I know.
3) Use some kind of alias. But I don’t know of any way to set that up on wordpress.com hosted sites.
4) Since the long URL is a page (and not a post), I could change the long URL and all references to the long URL (on my wordpress.com site) to a shorter URL. I see that your Omnisearch will find instances of code such as a long URL. However, I know of no way to easily search AND replace all instances of code such as a URL throughout a wordpress.com hosted site. Plus, in case I missed changing a URL somewhere else outside of wordpress (like in a file or on my other sites), it would be nice to have something like an htaccess file to forward things to the shorter URL, but I don’t think we can do that with wordpress.com hosted sites. I don’t have that many references to the long URL to fix, and I’m willing to do this if I have to, but it would sort of break the conceptual structure of that part of my site, so I wondered if there would be some other way.
5) Paying wordpress to map the subdomain to a page within my already domain-mapped site. I don’t know if that is even possible, AND I’d rather solve this problem without spending money if at all possible. This is the kind of problem that is not worth spending money on, and I might want to use the same technique for other long URLs later.
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Another idea: Is it possible to make a custom wordpress shortlink, with words I choose rather than the auto-generated link?
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HI David,
1) Use a wordpress shortlink for the page. Problem: when people read it in the video, it’s meaningless.
You can use the Get Shortlink button when you edit your post as seen here:
Another idea: Is it possible to make a custom wordpress shortlink, with words I choose rather than the auto-generated link?
You wouldn’t be able to customize it though.
2) Use a subdomain that points to the longer URL.
You can map a subdomain for $13/year – just like a normal domain mapping. For example you currently have loughry.com as your primary domain. You can add: blog.loughry.com and continue to have loughry.com as your primary domain. So when readers go to blog.loughry.com they will automatically be redirected to loughry.com.
3) Use some kind of alias. But I don’t know of any way to set that up on wordpress.com hosted sites.
it would be nice to have something like an htaccess file to forward things to the shorter URL, but I don’t think we can do that with wordpress.com hosted sites.
Unfortunately, this wouldn’t be possible on WordPress.com. If you need this you can move to the self-hosted WordPress.org site and use the WordPress install.
Let me know if you have any questions with this!
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Thanks!
As I said in the first two sentences of point 2 above, and also in point 5, I don’t want the subdomain to just go to the home page. I want it to go to a specific page with a long URL. Is this possible?
One of the key questions of point 4 above is do you provide any ways to search and replace a URL everywhere it appears on a site? I can use your search to find where it occurs, but I’m faced with manually changing every link one at a time.
Because of the security problems with self-hosted WordPress installs, and a couple of my WordPress sites getting hacked a few years ago, I’ve moved ALL of my WordPress sites to wordpress.com. Because of this, I’d recommend adding more advanced features to wordpress.com hosted sites for users who don’t have the time or patience to deal with WordPress security challenges on self-hosted WP installs. An example of a good advanced feature would the URL forwarding functionality of htaccess. Another example would be an advanced search and replace feature, for the URLs I want to change.
I’ve seen some domain-shortening services that allow some customizing of short URLs. This might be a feature of your shortlinks you could charge extra money for, as sometimes it could come in really handy, such as in my case here.
Thanks again!
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I want it to go to a specific page with a long URL. Is this possible?
The subdomains can only be mapped to your site, not a specific page on your site.
One of the key questions of point 4 above is do you provide any ways to search and replace a URL everywhere it appears on a site?
No, but you can export your post and do the search and replace that way via a 3rd party text editor.
Also when it comes to the customized shortlink, one thing I forgot to mention is that, If the post’s slug is 8 characters or less, the slug will be used instead of the encoded post ID.
Hope this helps and thanks for the suggestions!
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That’s good to know about the shortlinks and slugs! Unfortunately, I’m working with a page, and it looks like there are only slugs for posts. Is that right? Is there any way to make a slug for a page?
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Interesting. The page I’m working with has a parent page, so that parent page is part of this long URL. That’s one reason it’s a long URL. However, when I go to change the slug, I can only change the part related to the current page I’m editing, and not the parent part of the URL. Which makes sense.
So now the question becomes: If the page’s slug is 8 characters or less, EVEN IF it has a long parent part of the URL, in a shortlink, will that slug be used instead of the encoded post ID?
My guess is that everything behind the domain and slash (e.g. example.com/ or example.wordpress.com/) would have to be 8 characters or less for the shortlink to use those 8 or fewer characters. However, in this case, it would be nice if my guess is wrong.
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Ah, completely forgot about the shortlink. Yes, if the parent page’s slug is longer than 8 letter, the shortlink will not use it even for the subpage.
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