Four Island

I know what you're thinking. I'm going to start this post with my "Recently, I....." line that I've completely overused. Well, forget it. I've already written the first line, and it's not "Recently, I....", it's "I know what you're thinking." See? I've outsmarted you. The "Recently, I...." line is in the second paragraph.

Recently, I wrote a post entitled Lorelle Link and Comment Challenge which included a link to a post on Timbo94's blog, Dream Weaver. Timbo94 seems to have a strange habit of including special characters in his blog post titles, which mess up the permalink badly. In fact, when I clicked on the link in my admin panel, it just came up as 404.

Because of this, I decided to change his permalink structure to not include post titles. I discovered Wordpress' page on Permalink Structure Tags, and I was soon messing around, trying to create the ugliest permalink structure I could. In fact, I ended up with the monstrous:

/%category%/%author%/%year%%monthnum%%day%%minute%%second%
        %post_id%/

While that was fun, it made me think. If you're going to have a permalink structure (if you don't, I'll be scared of your blog), make sure it's a good one that you won't want to change sooner or later. Changing your permalink structure can make old backlinks fail, but a bad permalink structure (like special characters in post titles), backlinks will also fail.

In the case of Timbo, he should either have used a different permalink structure to begin with, or simply omitted the special characters from his post titles. And, the latter's probably preferable because, well, fourisland.com/blog/permalink-structure/ is much prettier than, to take the example of Wordpress' default permalink structure, fourisland.com/blog/?p=18 (or whatever this post's ID is).

But, you should also remember, that when picking a permalink structure, if you're going to make it obnoxious like the monstrosity above, make sure you actually like it before setting it in stone.