Default vs. Descriptive Permalinks
This post probably won’t mean anything to anyone who doesn’t use WordPress, but for those of you who do, I wanted to share.
When I moved this blog to WordPress about 3 years ago (which is probably something like 28 Internet years), I didn’t know any better and used the “default” version of the permalinks, which meant that all of my post permalinks were in the numbered WordPress format (http://spacesuitcase.com/?p=123).
I didn’t really think anything of it, until I noticed that newer WordPress users were using more descriptive day and name permalinks. While I didn’t really care about the advantages for search engine opimization, I really liked the more descriptive URLs since they offered date and name information in them. I tried to change my permalink settings, but at the time, it meant that any links to the older default formatted URLs would be broken. Since I had about 3 or 4 years of posts online at that point, that would be a lot of potential broken links, and that didn’t seem worth the trouble. I did make sure that when I started a new blog (like Almost Crafty), I chose the more descriptive permalink option before I even wrote my first post, to avoid the problem. And I just left the default permalinks on this blog, thinking that there was no way to ever change them.
Cut to recently (last week!) when I was writing a blog post. I noticed that it showed the preview of the post’s permalink like it always did, and was showing the default numbered link.But then next to that, it had an option (something like, “Do you want to change this?” or the like) and a link to the Permalink Settings page. Thinking I knew the answer, I went ahead and changed to the “Date and Name” option, just to see what would happen.
I checked my site, and sure enough, all of the permalinks for all of my posts had been changed to the new descriptive format. But here’s the kicker – if I input a permalink in the old default format, it automatically forwarded to the correct post with the new descriptive URL!
For real! Look! http://spacesuitcase.com/?p=123
I have no idea when this change took place or with which WordPres s upgrade. All I can tell you is that this made me SO HAPPY. Not because I really care that much about the permalinks on my site, but because it used to bug me, and I love it when I can fix something that really, really bugs me.
Like I said, this won’t make any difference to anyone out there who doesn’t have a WordPress site, or who started using WordPress after the descriptive permalinks were an option and have been using them all along. But for those of you like me who wanted to change the permalink structure but never thought you could – look what we can do now! Woo-hoo!
