The best permalink format for your site is so simple, you’re going to wonder why you never thought of it before. It’s obvious, intuitive, and perfect. In fact, I dare say it’s genius. Want to know what it is?
I told you it was obvious.
Look, you can waste immesurable hours and days trying to determine if /postname/ is better than /2012/postname, or you can sit down and remember you’re not making a site for search engines, but for your visitors.
SEO does have a point, don’t get me wrong. If it’s easy for people to find your site, you get more traffic. One of my sites, following the recent Panda and Penguin updates on Google, jumped from 5th place to 3rd on a search for the major keyword. Another went from 12th to 9th (we’re working on that). None of that has to do with me changing anything, or even picking the best SEO plugin. It was done the traditional way.
- I wrote good copy
- I networked with related sites for links
- I advertised
- I was memorable
Those three things, when done correctly, are how you get your site to rank high. And it’s that last item, being memorable, that should drive your URL choices.
A URL like http://example.com/12897342134/jkahsdu.aspx isn’t memorable. It tells me nothing of what your site’s about, what the topics are, what the subject is.
On the other hand, a URL like http://example.com/2011/how-to-save-elephants tells me quite a bit. I know when the post was written, so if there was a big to-do about elephants in 2011, it probably is related. But it’s not always easy to tell someone that URL, nor is it a given I’ll remember it tomorrow. I may remember that example.com had a cool posts about saving elephants, however. It’s certainly more likely I’ll remember it than the other link!
This is where WordPress does something cool, though. See, I can tell someone to go to http://example.com/how-to-save-elephants/ and that will redirect them to the right URL! You can do this on Drupal as well with a module called Global Redirect (Drupal folks, correct me if I’m wrong/there’s a better one).
To me, that says the issue isn’t what permalink pattern you pick, but what permalink slug you use! On that train of thought, what if I made my URL http://example.com/2011/save-elephants instead? Naturally then http://example.com/save-elephants would also work.
Now we can clearly see that ultimate issue is not the permalink structure. The only thing I don’t like about how WordPress defaults URLs is that I have to tell people ‘it’s example dot com slash save dash elephants’ and that’s not as easy as ‘example dot com slash elephants.’ Or even ‘saveelephants, all one word’ (I don’t know why that’s easier, but people tell me it is).
The whole reason people like short URLs is that they’re short and easier to remember. If I told you to get to a site you used http://bit.ly/elephant, you’d have a much higher likelihood of remembering. Invariably, however, we look at branding and think “I don’t want bit.ly to have my name.” That’s a case for Yourls, and now, as long as you customize all your Yourls, you’re in it to win it. I know most people use short URLs for Twitter and such, but I find that making a handy short URL to tell someone ‘go to foo dot in slash facebook’ works astonishingly well. Of course Facebook knows that too, and lets you use http://fb.com/username to find people.(I don’t have a yourls setup here because I’m incapable of finding a short URL I like.)
Sadly, there is one problem with this, and it’s that you can only use each ‘slug’ once, so once you’ve use ‘elephant’ you’re never able to use it again.
Name your slugs wisely and plan, as best you can, for the future.
It’s in beta, don’t nobody panic.
I’m not a super-psycho coder. But between being a busybody and being a volunteer plugin referee, I do spend a disproportionate amount of time looking at the code people put in for plugins, which means I actually see a lot more code, and a lot more submissions, than you might expect. This puts me in a place where I actually can offer some of the world’s most basic advice ever, that a surprising number of people seem to miss, about how to submit your plugins, what will get them downcheked, and what you really just shouldn’t do.
When you submit your plugin, put in a link to the code so it can be downloaded and checked. (See 
A subset of that is that if your plugin is a fork of someone else’s, be the good person and credit them! It’s not required all the time, but take a look at the copyright information on a plugin. Sometimes they say they require credit in the code. If so, you’ve got to do it. Even just a line that says “Copyright 2009-2011 Some Other Dude” and then “Copyright 2011 Me” below it. That’s a nice CYA. If you want to be really nice, put their userID under ‘contributors’ in the readme file, and they’ll have their pretty face on your plugin.
This happens when your plugin has been reported as possibly being in conflict with the developer guidelines, or it has a security hole. Many times you will not be notified when this happens. Sometimes you’re not notified because the report is found to be incorrect, and sometimes it’s because you’ve been warned before. And, once in a while, it’s because the person who closed your plugin doesn’t have the ability to email you. Surprise! There are some people on the plugin repository team who don’t have the access to the plugins email system, so when they close your plugin, they’ll ask someone else to email you. If that person is busy, it might take a while.
One of the ways to secure your web apps is to limit the damage they can cause. When you create a database for a webapp, you have to provide a user ID and password to connect to the database, logically enough. Illogically, most people just use the same username and password they use to SSH into their server. After all, it works.
This most often comes up when someone is suffering content theft. Invariably, someone will see their hard written prose on some scammy person’s site, and want it taken down. This is, sadly, harder to do than we’d like. Basically you have to find the site owner, contact them, ask them to take the stuff down, hope they do it, and when they don’t, go up to their webhost. I’m not going to get into the copyright issue, and just assume you know not to attack someone over links to your site (not illegal), rss feeds pulling excerpts from your site (ditto), or quotes (really?). If you don’t know what is and isn’t copyright/content theft, then you’re not ready for this yet.
