TECHNOLOGY: I love WordPress; just NOT the long urls

Freeloader Reinke reporting in with a new thought. (It’s so rare I have them I just had to share it. Besides I couldn’t sleep tonight so if I’m up everyone should be up.) (I tried to put this in last time I thought of it but you closed the feedback door, I forgot about it, and the delay is all your fault.)

Long urls.

Don’t get me wrong, I love WordPress. But the urls that you produce are too long imho. I use tinyurl a lot when I blog, email, or comment. Only because the likelihood of getting one right is lowered by length. If transcription is involved, forget about it.

Here’s an illustration.

https://reinkefj.wordpress.com/2007/03/27/
technology-an-impressive-mindmap-of-blogging-platforms/

has a length of 96 characters and resulted in the following TinyURL which has a length of 25 characters:

http://tinyurl.com/3dscft

Now, I bet that WordPress has an underlying database there somewhere. And further I bet it has an index in there somewhere. And I’ll be that ReinkeFacesLife maps to USER#123456 and “3dscft” maps to post #1492.

Finally I’d guess that it might be possible to expose a url like http://www.wordpress.com/123456/1492 if you really wanted to.

Tell me that this is already available and I’ll be really embarrassed. I thought I read ALL the doc.

Any way, here’s my insomnia fueled idea fwiw.

===

Update: Here’s the WordPress response. 

From: Mark @ wordpress.com
Sent: Tuesday, March 27, 2007 5:15 AM
To: reinkefj
Subject: [WordPress #CFW-680457]: reinkefj.wordpress.com

Hi,
It’s not already there.
The permalink is created using the most friendly option.
It tells a real person the date / title at a glance and it also is good for search engines.
You can shorten yours though – http://faq.wordpress.com/2006/10/23/post-options-post-slug/
–

Mark

===

Not what I wanted to hear, but at least I didn’t overlook an option. fjohn

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 27th, 2007 at 03:33 and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to TECHNOLOGY: I love WordPress; just NOT the long urls

  1. Daniel R. Sweet's avatar Daniel R. Sweet says:
    Wednesday, March 28, 2007 at 09:24

    I’m surprised that they don’t have the same option that I have in a remote hosted WordPress solution.

    I can turn my urls to look like this:

    http://www.fracat.com/jobsblog/?p=145 (My posting for a Microsoft-centric BI guys, if anyone happens to know one – or several!)

    Although, I do use the same thing you have for the descriptives on the main blog, even when they get long:

    http://www.fracat.com/blog/2007/03/28/caitbhw-day-3-the-people-you-meet-inside-your-boss-head/

    And yes, they can get long!

    Dan

    Like

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