If you have ever clicked my “Tweet This Post!” icon at the bottom of the post, you’ll see that it will take you to Twitter so you can tell all your followers about the great post you’ve just read. Because of the 140 character limit, URLs that are longer than 30 characters are shorten with an URL shortening service like TinyURL or Bit.ly. If you look at the URL I use, you’ll see that it still has johnchow.com in it. I do this to maintain and reinforce my brand. Here’s how to create your own tiny URL for your WordPress blog.

Shortening The Default WordPress URL

We begin by shortening the WordPress URL structure. By default, WordPress names its URL as yourblog.com/?p=xxxx, with the xxxx being the post number. The default URL isn’t very Google friendly and most bloggers will turn on the SEO friendly URL instead. However, the default URL will still work even if you’ve turn on SEO friendly URL. The URL will simply forward to the SEO one.

Because it’s a lot shorter, the default WordPress URL makes a great starting point to create our own custom short URL. The first thing I did was remove the ?p= so the URL becomes johnchow.com/xxxx. You do this by adding the following code to your htaccess file.

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/([0-9]+)$
RewriteRule .* http://www.johnchow.com/?p=%1 [R=301,L]

Change jonchow.com to your domain and you should be good to go. I highly recommend you back up your htaccess file before editing it.

Create The Tweet This Post Link

The following code will create the Tweet This Post link you see at the bottom of my blog articles.

<a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://twitter.com/home/?status=Reading @JohnChow – <?php the_title(); ?> http://johnchow.com/<?php the_ID(); ?>”><img src=”http://www.johnchow.com/images/tweet-this.png” alt=”Tweet This” /> <strong>Tweet This Post!</strong></a>

Insert the above code (change to your domain and twitter name and upload your own bird image and link to that) into your WordPress single.php file at the point where you want the Tweet This link to show up. In my case, I have it appear at the end of the post. If you click the Tweet This Post link, it will send you to Twitter and the following tweet would be insert into your What are you doing? box.

Reading @JohnChow – How To Create Your Own Tiny URL http://johnchow.com/9894

Doing it this way allows me to bypass the use of an URL shortening service. JohnChow.com only has one more letter than TinyURL.com so this isn't a big deal. What is a big deal is the URL has my blog domain name in it and reinforces my brand. The other advantage is I don’t have to worry about TinyURL or bit.ly going down and messing the URL up. You can save yourself a few letters by using www instead of http:// as Twitter.com will auto link the URL. However, Twitter clients like TweetDeck will not link the URL if it's missing the http:// so I recommend you stick with that and not brother with the www.

You won't have to worry about readers seeing the shorten URL after they get to your blog because WordPress will auto forward them to the SEO friendly URL. I added a ref=nofollow tag to ensure that no Google juice is passed to the short URL.

If you like this post, please click the Tweet This Post link and tell all your followers about it.

Find out what I’m doing right now by following me on Twitter.

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Frugal Theme is a new WordPress 2.8 compatible theme designed by Eric Hamm. Eric created Frugal as a fully customizable theme for the non-coder. The theme is so complete, it comes with a 29 page user manual. According to Eric, it’s all about the content.

When it comes down to it, your blog's content is MUCH more important that the theme itself. Sure, you don't want your site to look tacky or amateurish or misrepresent the focus of your blog, but at the end of the day, it's WHAT your saying that creates the draw for your potential subscribers, not what color the background is when they read it (though that can have an effect). So in designing the frugal Wordpress theme I kept in mind the idea of providing the absolute best possible framework to put ALL the focus on the words and images you provide your readers…no more, no less. In it's stock form, the frugal theme is light and clear and perfect for the next great work you are about to share.

Light and clean also mean super fast. Frugal has built-in ad widgets, custom avatars and custom favicon so you can install less plugins to your blog and therefore have less clutter slowing your site down. Speaking of clutter, Frugal Theme uses zero images. You'd be surprised at how many images a lot of themes use for things like their navigation bars, backgrounds, headers, footers, etc.

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Frugal Theme is available in both free and premium versions. The free version cost zero. You can download and use it on your blog right away. The premium version starts at $79 for a single user license and goes up to $199 for a developer license. Of course, Frugal Premium has a lot more options and features to justify the non-free price. Which one you should use depends on the features you need.

Download the free version of Frugal and give it a test drive. You may find it’s all you need. If you need the extra features of Frugal Premium, you can always upgrade to that later. Here’s a video explaining the many features and benefits of Frugal Theme.

Download Frugal Theme