franz-josef-kaiser/WordPress-GitHub-Plugin-Updater — comment on commit c0699239965d2c5e850b89d9f8ad5ded7a755bdd
File: updater.php line 53
By GaryJones:

Check against any of the popular code standards and you'll see that most have a note about not abbreviating variables. It's basic best practice.

A name of `$github` or `$github_domain` would suffice here, and would not make any lines go significantly over the (loose suggested) limit of 80-100 characters (the fact that you've stated a range, means it's not set in stone).

However, since this plugin is all about Github, and since Github aren't going to be changing their root domain any time soon, I think this extraction of the domain is actually pointless and hurts the code by being less readable., not mention the (albeit extremely tiny) performance hit by now having several strings in double-quotes instead of single. You're not making the domain filterable or doing anything special with it, so there's no need to extract it. A more likely candidate to extract would be the project name portion of the URL, as that is more likely to change than Github's domain.