When Matt announced that he had purchased the wp.me domain back in August, there was a lot of questioning on what he would do with it. After publishing a poll and getting ideas on what to do, he developed a URL shortener for WordPress.com users where they could easily create a wp.me link to their blog post from within the editor screen. Matt promised that in the future, WordPress.org users would be able to take advantage of the URL shortener if they used the WordPress.com stats plugin. I’ve been using the plugin ever since the announcement but have yet to see the WP.me link generator added on.
Yesterday however, I noticed that the plugin had an update available. Reading the changelog I noticed the WP.me shortlinks support would be available. After upgrading the plugin, I still didn’t see the button that generates these links. A few people on Twitter and the forum told me they could see it but they were using WordPress 2.9. I’ve since confirmed that if you are running WordPress 2.8.6 you will not see the link generator but it will become available once you upgrade to WordPress 2.9 and version 1.6 of the WordPress.com stats plugin.
Community member Otto did some digging around and he published his findings on how the shortener works in the following thread.
The Get Shortlink button appears next to the edit button when writing or editing a post.
The link generated for this post: http://wp.me/pBMYe-Lu
I think I really dig this new feature in 2.9 – way easier than each time going through anther web service or have yet another Firefox toolbar.