Tread lightly on the things of earth

Early on in my Movable Type weblog design journey, I let Mark and Anders guide me toward greater website accessibility.

But as time goes on some of these suggestions have gotten long in tooth — Mark himself made some sweeping changes toward “cruft-free URLs” nearly a year ago. What I’ve been most aware of in my configuration to date is how lengthy some of my entries’ permalinks were getting.

Goals

I want to shorten my permalink URLs, and while doing so I might as well also incorporate other changes suggested by Mark et al.:

• Change underscores to hyphens (for more advantageous Googlification)
• Drop filename extensions (a step toward future-proofing against published file format changes)
• Eliminate unnecessary daily archive subcategory (monthly’s enough; I don’t post much)
• Redirect old lengthy permalinks to the spiffy new ones (so incoming Google searchers land on intended page)

Result

before:
http://maikimo.net/mt/archives/2004/06/01/  \    changes_afoot_musings_about_webhosts_blogging_software_freedom.html

after:
http://maikimo.net/mt/archives/2004/06/changes-afoot

How

Shorten filename part of entry permalinks:

Dave’s Short Title Plugin employs square-bracketed keyword(s), if present, as the entry’s short title (or “slug,” the term Mark uses). Non-bracketed keywords continue to function as keywords, which I need for generating related entries.

Install the plugin, then in MT’s Templates > Archiving screen for the weblog under consideration, change the Individual Entry Archive’s Archive File Template format

from
<$MTArchiveDate format="%Y/%m/%d"$>/<$MTEntryTitle dirify="1"$>.html

to
<$MTArchiveDate format="%Y/%m/%d"$>/<$MTEntryShortTitle dirify="1"$>.html

Change underscores to hyphens:

Use Crys’ DirifyPlus plugin instead of the built-in dirify:

which changes previous result to
<$MTArchiveDate format="%Y/%m/%d"$>/<$MTEntryShortTitle dirifyplus="pld"$>.html

(where p = elim all slashes, l = convert to lowercase, d = convert spaces to dashes)

Drop filename extension:

which leads to
<$MTArchiveDate format="%Y/%m/%d"$>/<$MTEntryShortTitle dirifyplus="pld"$>

Eliminate unnecessary daily archive subcategory:

which leads finally to
<$MTArchiveDate format="%Y/%m"$>/<$MTEntryShortTitle dirifyplus="pld"$>

as the Individual Entry Archive’s Archive File Template format.

Redirect old lengthy permalinks to spiffy new ones:

Use Nathan’s idea to let MT generate the archives/.htaccess that rewrites old URL formats to new. Here’s the .htaccess implementation I came up with (click the Download link). I’m using this as content of a new index template that outputs archives/.htaccess.

I found parsing extension-free files for PHP directives (which I need) requires
ForceType application/x-httpd-php

so I put that in there, but it then needs to be overridden with a
ForceType none

in archives/images/.htaccess and archives/photos/.htaccess to allow graphics to display.

Precedents

I had observed the following:

Mark’s URLs generated by WordPress now look like
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/06/18/favorite-jokes

Shelley’s URLs generated by WP look like
http://weblog.burningbird.net/archives/2004/06/21/what-was-interesting/

Default WP permalinks look like
http://maikimo.net/wp/archives/2004/05/16/hello-world/

Default Textpattern clean permalinks look like
http://maikimo.net/txp/article/1/first-post