Blog Setup Tip: Keep Your Blog's URLs Under 80 Characters

You know how annoying it is when people email you links that are broken because they're too long? It isn't really your friend's fault. The problem lays with the webmaster of the site your friend is trying to tell you about. Wouldn't it be great if you could prevent that from happening when people send links from your blog to their friends? It turns out that it's a fairly simple thing to do.

For MovableType blogs, go to Settings > New Entry Defaults > Basename Length to find the variable influencing your URL length.

Basename Length determines how many characters long your individual post's URLs will be. By default, the basename is the first 30 characters of your blog post's title, so a post titled, "What the heck is Basename Length?" would be

yourdomain.com/what_the_heck_is_basename_lengt.html

Notice the missing "gh" because it cropped at 30 characters.

If your domain name happens to be fairly long, consider shortening your basename length to avoid those nasty URL wrapping issues. How much should you truncate it? Enough to get make your individual post URLs come in under 80 characters. Here's what an individual post URL looks like:
http://www.technologyevangelist.com/2006/04/my_top_3_favorite_go.html

The sum of the following creates your full URL length for individual posts:

http://www.
yourdomain.com (or .org, .edu, etc.)
/year/
/month/
post base name
.html (or whichever extension you choose to use.)

The longer your domain, the more you may need to shorten your basename length to keep things under 80 characters. We chose 20 characters for this site, which brings us in under 80 characters with a few characters to spare.

BONUS TIP: If you want to avoid sending broken URLs to your friends and coworkers, consider adding the TinyURL extension to your FireFox browser. You can add a TinyURL creation link to your toolbar, or create a TinyURL for the page you're on from the right-click menu. It even saves the TinyURL to your clipboard, so you can click over to your email program, paste the TinyURL and you're set. No more nasty broken links.

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HTML Tags you can use in your posts:
<b>Bold</b> = Bold
<i>Italicized</i> = Italicized
<a href="http://www.othersite.com">Link to Other Site</a> = Link to Other Site

Please keep comments on-topic. Contact authors or other commenters
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