Cruft-free URLs in Movable Type: Mark Pilgrim has created a great URL scheme in Movable Type for the cleanest URLs I’ve seen yet. Clean URLs are an anal-retentive obsession with me. I found this via a great page at Brainstorms and Raves devoted to URL beauty.
Mark is using MT keywords to store part of the URL. This brings up a frustrating thing with MT: the lack of user-definable fields. It’s sad that I have to waste a field for something as small as this. Just five user-definable fields would improve MT immensely.
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There's an accepted theory in SEO: put keywords in your URLs. This is so accepted, that no one questions it and content management systems routinely have modules, extensions, and allowances for users to create keyword-rich URLs. But, does this work? Does anyone know for sure? I've been casually…
I've complained off and on about the lack of user-defined fields in Movable Type. Today was finally the day I got off my high-horse and messed with some code. Here is a method to add a new field to the MT database. The field can store whatever you like,…
Friday Feast #55: Friendly, Lasting URLs-: A great collection of links to articles about URLs — how to plan them, how to make sure they make sense, and how to make sure they stick around. Timely, considering my issues of late. Via Anil Dash.
How-to Change a Movable Type URL Structure and Survive to Tell About It: Oliver Travers has a good tutorial on changing your URL structure, and how to do it without losing any traffic. This is timely for me since I changed the URL structure of this site a few weeks ago…
TinyURL.com - where tiny is better!: Make your URLs smaller. I think this is a simple rediection lookup. "By entering in a URL in the text field below, we will create a tiny URL that will not break in email postings and never expires." Entering two URLs immediately after one another…
Reading USAToday.com over a bowl of cereal this morning, I clicked on story about the Columbia shuttle disaster only to get an error about a non-existent domain. I checked the link: http:// cms-preview-site2-t.usatin.usatoday.com/ tech/ news/ 2003-06-04-colu mbia-foam-test_x.htm Looks like a "CMS preview" link accidently made it's way into production. I always get intrigued…
I've always been a big believer in legible URLs. There's nothing more annoying than a URL that stretches into hundreds of characters — ever tried to email one of those to a mail client that wraps at 76 characters? Additionally, I've written before about the need to support…
The next best thing to user-defined fields in MT is Brad Choate's Key-Value MT plug-in. Find it at: http://www.bradchoate.com/past/keyvalues.php