Provides a more advanced set of dirify options.

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If Movable Type creates an archive file, it converts the entry's title into a filename. With this conversion all blanks from the title are replaced by underscores. But if you want to achieve a good ranking in Google, this is no good replacement. Fortunately the behaviour can be changed.

Factors influencing Google

There are a number of factors that have an influence on the ranking of a page in Google's result lists. Of course the page's content is analyzed with respect to the searched keywords. However, the words appearing in the domain name and the file name also have some influence on the results. Thus, for achieving the best result it is important to know, how Google splits a URL...

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Question

I have a couple of categories. When using the MTCategories tag, these are sorted by name. However, I preferred if I could choose the order manually. There is a logical order of the categories, and the categories should be listed in that order. Can it be done?

Answer

Movable Type does not have a built-in function for achieving an arbitrary ordering of the category list. We have to use a plugin for that.

The idea for implementing the ordering is as follows: we will prefix all category names with some text, which is removed right before the category name is output to HTML. As an example please look at my top-level categories in the sidebar. These are... • Basics • Installation...

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The first question/answer from Ask Arvind...

Lea writes:

Can you provide tips on how to have cruft-free URLs (a la diveintomark.org, as well as others)? I already have this employed in my blog, but a lot of others don't.

The diveintomark tutorial in question can be found here.

First of all what is cruft ? Cruft is basically the extensions of webpages for example .php, .html etc. In the field of SEO it is meant to be very bad. Here's a - hopefully easier - method to have cruft-free urls. For this to work you will need to install the Short-Titles plugin (thanks Amit!)

•

Blank out "File Extension for Archive Files" under Weblog Config → Preferences •

Change the Archive File...

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As I mentioned before, I ported a few plugins I was using to the dynamic system. The first of the plugins I ported was for dashify my urls (replaces the spaces with dashes rather than underscores like in dirify).

I mainly use the very simple Dashify plugin to dashify my titles so here's a php port - modifier.dashify.php however for those of you that prefer to use the more powerful DirifyPlus I've made a php port for it too - modifier.dirifyplus.php.

To ensure that the files are formatted correctly I recommend you right click the links and click save as. Upload them to your php/plugins/ directory to enable them.

Syntaxing remains the same e.g. <MTEntryTitle dashify="1"> or...

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Movable Type uses an entry's title for creating the individual archive filename. However, umlauts are not supported very well. But it would be a good feature, if the two-character substitutes (for example "ae" instead of "ä") were used in naming the file.

The dirifyplus Plugin

In Filename with Underscore or Dash? I described the dirifyplus Plugin and showed, how it can be used for creating Google-friendly filenames. The plugin just has the small disadvantage: umlauts are not supported.

The source code for the plugin is available. I do not know Perl at all, but as a software developer this task can certainly be solved.

Extending the Plugin

Open the file...

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Some people like Movable Type to separate words in a post's friendly URL by using hyphens instead of underscores, since some search engines seem to prefer hyphens to seaparate words. Good news from Cal Henderson: he's made dashify, a Movable Type 3 plugin which lets you simply use dashify="1" instead of dirify="1" in your archive path settings to make your URLs dashier.

Update: Oops! I forgot to mention Ian Fenn's DirifyDashes plugin that he'd made back in June. Along with DirifyPlus and Dirify for Unicode, most of your dirification needs should be well covered.

Trackbacks:

Warnadunia.NET Plug - Dashify - October 5, 2004 01:30 PMCal's dashify plugin. (via)...

Neil's Smaller...

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Way back when, I changed my permalink methods so that I would end up with more useful link names. More useful to me, and perhaps to you as well. Over time, this generally worked very well. But as time wore on, I found more and more often I was creating entries for software releases and they all had the very same format that I had to put into the keywords field all the time. Blech.

The problem was that the Movable Type dirify function was dropping the hyphens (-) and the dots (.) from my entry names, when I wanted them to be in the entry link. What was I to do?

Well, I found the dirifyplus plugin not long ago and was using it for something else, so I figured that it must be able to...

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10.29.2004

Firefox on the March

Red Herring's got an interview with Rob Davis, the man behind the campaign to advertise Firefox in the New York Times. It's especially good timing for promoting every geek's favorite browser, since the updated roadmap shows the browser scheduled for release on November 9th.

Posted by Anil in at 03:58 PM | Permalink | Trackback (0)

10.29.2004

Advice to the bloglorn

Metaforix President Lois C. Ambash has some advice for those afraid of business blogging. It's a solid set of guidelines, but we also loved the praise for TypePad:

As a novice blogger, I chose TypePad for my own blog, and I couldn't be happier. The...

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