Nora Brown Design

Mind your urls!

The permanent url (often called a permalink, or url-only title) of a blog post is, by default, generated from its title. Textpattern generally takes the words in your title, removes most punctuation, and adds in hyphens. So the pemalink of this post will become http://www.norabrowndesign.com/blog/mind-your-urls.

The url-only title field

However, if you change your mind about the title, or correct a typo, Textpattern does not generate a new url. This behavior is generally desirable because if you change the url of an old post, you break all existing external links to it. However, if the article is recent, you’ll want to get the permanent url right, and you can do that in the lower left corner of the Write page.

Some guidelines for managing urls

• Check your url-only title for typos
• Make your url-only title generally consistent with your post title
• Shorten extremely long url-only titles to something more manageable
• If your title uses funky punctuation, check the url to see that Textpattern treated it appropriately. If not, correct it.
• Don’t go changing url-only titles of old blog posts, as it will break existing external links to it.