Patent Law

Wanted: WordPress Permalinks That Don't Suck

By Erik J. Heels

I just want to write articles, not tags or filenames.

Quick question for the WordPress community about permalinks. The SEO community has debated the merits of the URL text for SEO for years.

On www.clocktowerlaw.com, I use custom permalinks:
http://www.clocktowerlaw.com/%postname%/

On www.erikjheels.com, I use the default permalinks:
http://www.erikjheels.com/?p=%post_id%

I have avoided customizing the default permalinks on my blog because I hate (despise, detest) long URLs that are formed by long titles. (And don't get me started about long URLs in email messages.) There's something to be said for the short default URLs: they are short. And they don't reveal date information, which may minimize clicks. As in, "I'm not clicking on that link. From the permalinks, it looks too old!" I use dates in URLs to help decide what I'm going to click on. I'm certain others do.

I don't want "I Think I Will Take A Trip To DC" to become "i-think-i-will-take-a-trip-to-dc.html" or the like. Yuck.

In Movable Type, there was a plugin that automatically truncated the length of the basename (or "slug" as they call it in WordPress) to a defined number of characters. But auto-truncation isn't the right solution (because "i-think-i-will.html" is also a bad filename). Neither is having to manually edit the slug each time. Technology, people, we have technology! I just want to write good titles and have good filenames created. What I'm looking for is a plugin with some sense. One that would take "I Think I Will Take A Trip To DC" and turn it into "trip-to-dc.html" by removing the least significant words.

Amazon uses Statistically Improbably Phrases or SIPs to index books and the like. SIPs are keywords or keyphrases with insignificant words removed.

Yahoo!'s Term Extraction API does the same sort of thing. I used this API (actually used a plugin that used the Yahoo! API) on Movable Type to automatically tag my articles.

So I'm hoping to find a WordPress plugin that automatically creates relevant filenames from posts. OK, I lied, it wasn't a short question. But at least the permalink is short.

Full post as published by Erik J. Heels on March 26, 2008 (boomark / email).