Today, I ran across an interesting article on URL Sentences by Chris Shiflett. The idea that a URL should read like a sentence just tickled my fancy. I like to tweet my blog posts, and being able to tweet a full URL that actually meant something in and of itself would be priceless.
So I did it. I figure I had recently migrated my site to WordPress and mapped all my URLs, I just as well map them again. I changed both my Categories and Tags URL structure. The Categories URL now has a verb + subject and the Tags looks like my ruminations on a particular topic.
For example, This article will be in the blogging category which looks like http://mike.creuzer.com/does/blogging and the URLs tag, which looks like http://mike.creuzer.com/on/URLs.
Like I said, this just tickles me 3 shades of pink, this day of URL shorteners like http://ow.ly/1TcIq.
I used a couple of plugins to make this happen.
The Top Level Categories plugin removes the need to have a top level category in the URL, so now I can just have the categories without needing /topics/ or /category/ in the URL. The old URL structure http://mike.creuzer.com/topics/blogging still works fine, so any links and searches come up ok. It will take time for the search engines to migrate over to the new URL structure, but that’s fine.
The Redirection Plugin is what I used to map all my old blogger URLs over to the WP URL space. I just added a new entry to map the /tags/ to /on/ after I changed the PermiLinks Tag Base to ‘on’. /tag/(.*) => /on/$1 using the 301 moved permanently setting.
I checked a few of the highest traffic category and tag pages, and made sure that they still worked. My Topics and Tags are the #2 and #3 ‘sections’ of my website, beat out only by ‘2009’, the archive section for last year.
I can’t wait to start tweeting my really readable URLs in the near future!
