I’m using friendly URLs, like so:
http://localhost/gallery/photo/this-is-a-url-friendly-photo-caption
On the friendly URL, I need to add the ID of the photo, but looking around, I’ve seen two ways of adding the ID to the friendly URL, pre and post, like so
http://localhost/gallery/photo/this-is-a-url-friendly-photo-caption.529
or
http://localhost/gallery/photo/529/this-is-a-url-friendly-photo-caption
Is there an advantage using one way? Or it’s just a question of preference / personal taste?
A small advantage of having the ID in the second last and the slug in the last path segment (/gallery/photo/529/this-is…):
In some contexts the URL might get cut off, for example by a line break in plain text emails. If the ID comes before the (usually long) slug, there’s a higher chance that the ID stays intact and the URL can keep functioning (assuming that you redirect to the canonical variant with slug).
Example
Your question currently has this URL:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27343034/seo-friendly-url-where-to-add-the-id
When it gets cut off like that (= the ID stays intact), it redirects to the canonical variant and the user is happy:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27343034/seo
-friendly-url-where-to-add-the-id
But when it gets cut off like that (= a different ID), the user is not so happy (because the link leads to a different page):
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/273430
34/seo-friendly-url-where-to-add-the-id
Related
Assume I have a site with a unique URL for users, e.g. abc.com/user1.
I want users to be able to create their own user urls like abc.com/user1 to abc.com/foo
The problem here is that my site has static pages such as: about, help, contact, download.
On the profile page, when users change their url, i apply this validator to their new profile url:
'username' => 'required|alpha_dash|max:20|min:3|unique:users'
In this situation, if the user chooses their new profile url to the same as a Route of my app (help, about, download...), their URL looks like: abc.com/about, this is troublesome.
Of course, the Validator will return true because that name is valid: min=3, max=20 and unique in "users" table ( "users" table not contains any control, of course).
To solve this, I add name of some Route to "users" table (about,contact,download...), so they cannot make their profile URL like abc.com/about,
But this is not good idea, because I might add more Routes in future.
PS: I dont like URL like abc.com/profile/user1, must be abc.com/user1.
Please help me to solve this.
You can use Route::getRoutes() to get all registered routes in your application
$routes = Route::getRoutes();
foreach($routes as $route){
echo $route->getUri(); // getUri will return the url pattern it matches
}
Now you can use this to check if the username doesn't appear in your routes.
But be careful! If you want to add routes in when the application is running you will have to check everytime that there's no user that has taken the name you want to chose.
Here are some possibilities
1. Call static page routes first
You can either call the static routes first and then at the end you do a catchall like lukasgeiter suggested, or you might even do a check in the controller and go through your static pages first. The problem here is that the user can create the user (e.g. "about") but then when they call that page, they would see the about page, even though they've correctly created the username, this might create a confusion.
2. Blacklist
Another way would be to create a blacklist for these usernames, so that people can't even register these types of usernames (this would be similar to your solution of pre-creating those usernames, but this way would be a bit cleaner and more easily expandable). Using this you will always have the trouble that someone will have used the username, once you want to use it as a static page. E.g. when you want to expand into another country.
3. Static pages on one level lower
E.g. you can create the static pages one level lower, such as abc.com/static/about, so there would be no clash.
4. Prepend character before username
This is the way I went, because the other ways were technically a bit too risky for me. So I chose the '#' sign for my users. So abc.com/#ThisIsMe is my current solution. It works in different languages (as opposed to abc.com/profile/thisisme would only work in languages, where profile is the correct term)
I think Flickr went from flickr.com/username to flickr.com/photos/username. Google+ doesn't really let you decide, but makes suggestions (AND adds the +). Twitter and Facebook let users choose their own, I would assume they have a blacklist. LinkedIn uses /in/.
I've been through a few similar posts,
Facebook Like Custom Profile URL PHP
Custom URL / Apache URL Rewriting
But its still not clear, the actual method/process is not available..
Guys , little more guidance would do a lot..
I would like to put forward the questions here:
Users should have a chance to decide what is their url, Just like in case of fb, twitter
for example: www.facebook.com/harry.inaction
I am using the linux, apache, mysql, php environment for this.
Users are identified based on their user id's which get created automatically when they join in
And I fail at the very first step, seriously I don't know get started.
Thanks
It's going to be impossible to put any details as an answer because you've got to build this system of yours and there's more than one way to do it. Design decisions will need to be made based on the way you want things to work and what you already have (they're going to have to work together in some way).
Say you've already got a system for creating users (and it sounds like you do) and you already have a system for viewing profiles. You'll need to extend this system so that you store an extra "my_vanity_url" field in your user table in your database. This field needs to be unique. When a user edits their profile, they have the option of changing this to whatever they want (limiting it to only letters and numbers and dashes for simplicity).
Next, when you display this profile, say it is via /profile.php, your code needs to check a few things.
First it needs to check how it's called, looking at $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] you can see either /user/some-vanity-name or /profile.php?u=1234.
If it's the latter, you need to redirect the browser, do a database lookup to see who the user with user_id 1234 is.
Pull the "my_vanity_url" column out of the database for this user and redirect the browser to /user/my_vanity_url_value (replacing my_vanity_url_value with the value of that column).
So now, if you go to http://your.domain.com/profile.php?u=1234, your browser gets redirected and the URL address bar will say http://your.domian.com/user/my_name.
Next, you need to be able to take that unique name and turn it back into the old ugly looking profile page. Two things need to happen here:
You need to extend your profile.php once more to take an optional vanity name as opposed to a user_id
You need to use mod_rewrite to internally route vanity names to /profile.php
For the first thing, you simply look for a different $_GET[] parameter instead of whatever it is for a user_id. Say it's called name: so look at $_GET['name'], see if it exists, if it does lookup the user in the user table whose vanity url name is $_GET['name']. Return the profile of that user.
For the second thing, you just need to put this in the appropriate place in your htaccess file in your document root:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/?user/([A-Za-z0-9-]+)/?$ /profile.php?name=$1 [L]
This is just an example for how to implement something like this. It may be completely inapplicable for what you have, but it should give you an idea of what you need to do.
What i'm trying to do is to rewrite URLs to make them more SEO friendly but i still want to pass a parameter as an int ID.
For example, a URL pointing to a news article might look like this:
"www.domain.com/category-id/article-id" or "domain.com/5/3"
What i want to do is to rewrite the URL everywhere so that the title of the category and the title of the article are written into the URL so it becomes f.x. "domain.com/politics/some-title" but i still want to pass the ID of the article as an argument to the controller action. This is less important for the category but it's something i want to do with the article-id since it's unique but the title might not be.
I have checked out Attribute Routing and looked through some Routing guides and questions but haven't found anything that lets me implement this functionality. I've just started using ASP.NET MVC so i haven't been able to look into anything too advanced.
Thanks in advance.
I would advice to make the article title unique and from the controller action you have to get the article based on the title.
I see you are trying to group the articles based on category. When I initially created my blog I thought the same-thing but soon realized it's not a flexible approach because of couple of reasons.
Say you wrote one article with name some-title and dropped it under a category say politics and so the url will be domain.com/politics/some-title but at a later point of time you thought to move the article to another category say 'international-politics' therefore your url now has to be changed to domain.com/international-politics/some-title and you break the old url and whoever has bookmarked that link will now receive 404. A better way would be organize the urls based on the posted date and that's not going to change something like http://domain.com/archive/yyyy/mm/dd/unique_title
Sometimes you want to label an article with more than one category and at that time a tag based approach will become a better choice compared to category based approach.
Quick and dirty solutions:
1) domain.com/categoryName/articleID/articleName/
2) domain.com/date/categoryName/articleName (date should help make articleName unique)
3) domain.com/categoryName/articleName?id=xxx
Nothing fancy, but those approaches will work.
One of my developers is building a Facebook tab application for a promotion we're running. During this promotion, some users will be given trophy awards. One of the pages in the tab application will list the trophies and their winners and we would like to have Like / Comment / Share links underneath them, like with URL shares:
Now it would be relatively easy to hand-roll this functionality for items that have a distinct URL (and so can be nodes in the OpenGraph) and that's what I think we'll have to do for the blog-like functionality, I think. (For clarity's sake, none of the current Social Plugins meets the right needs.) But I can't see how to do so for these trophies, which don't have a distinct URL.
I am right in thinking that "things that don't have a unique URL" can't be OpenGraph nodes, right?
Correct. Every node in the Open Graph has its own distinct URL.
The querystring is considered part of the URL: you could use it to make the URL unique but render the same page.
For example, if you access this url :Hidden features of mod_rewrite and this one Hidden features of mod_rewrite. It goes right to the same page, and it seems Stackoverflow doesn't check for a valid slug (as wordpress calls it).
I'd use just the ID as the slug may change but you'd still want old links to work.
For example, if someone edited the title of their question you'd want to change the slug appropriately, but you wouldn't want old links to the question to stop working.
Should we check slugs passed in URLS or just use the ID? +)
String is only for user-friendlieness.
I don't see any reason to check the slug if you already have the id. Users shouldn't manually change the URL's, but no harm is done if they do.
Some web applications only have a slug (no id), but then extra care has to be taken to ensure it is unique. Just including and checking the id is much simpler, especially in frameworks like rails.
Since the numerical ID is the only information needed to identify the resource, the slug has only descriptive characteristics. But this description should be appropriate to the resource. So, yes, you should check if the slug is the proper one and correct it if not.