Solving My Permalink Problem

Not so long ago, I posted an article that put an explanation about domain and hosting. But as any Wordpress user should realize, when we’re typing the post’s title, the post-slug is generated automatically (clever isn’t it?). And that was what I missed for pay my attention to. Since I was pausing on deciding my post’s title, the post-slug was generated, which was far from pleasing me (it was a sequence of number, the post ID).

After finishing my writings, I published the article and moved to another business. Two days later, I noticed that permalink issue. Instead of

http://nichpakaich.com/twaddle/analogy-domain-hosting

I got;

http://nichpakaich.com/twaddle/113

for the permalink.

I don’t feel like it, and then I go to my dashboard and edit the post-slug. “There you go”, I said. That time I thought I was pleased without causing any harm to others.

But one of my friend contacted me not long after I changed the permalink. He said that one of Google Result that leading to my page, ended up with a 301. And that page was that explanation about domain and hosting post. So I tried to google it. The result is shocking, I was on the first page, next to a digg page which related to my post.

The Dilemma

I don’t want to change my permalink (some call it “pretty-link“) back to that undescribing number-based ID. But the temptation for the traffic made me frustated (heh, I can put some hope in it, can I?).  So I tried to do some study regarding this 301 pain-in-the-neck.

I did put my brain into some excercise, and I picked this “redirect” method as the best way out.

301 Redirect

I decided that I’m going to use htaccess to accomplish the 301 redirect. Because it was highly suggested (based on my googling result). Why? Because it’s  fairly convenient to manage, rather than setting redirects on each individual page, which can mean a lot of work when you’re maintaining a Wordpress blog. It was really simple, and this method is applicable to any web server that accepting htaccess.

The code to redirect the 301 page is as simple as the following single-line
Redirect 301 /twaddle/113 http://nichpakaich.com/twaddle/analogy-domain-hosting
(each different colored-text word, is separated by space)

And that solved my problem! From now on, everyone who came to my site and headed to that “113″ page, will be redirected to the current accepted permalink.

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