Search Engine Friendly URLs - Website Publisher. By: Chris Beasley, Published: 2003-04-21 Updated: 2006-03-02, Parent Categories: Search Engine Optimization, PHP Print I first wrote this article in 2001 for SitePoint.com, then when this site launched in 2003 it was republished here. It has since become what is probably the most popular search engine friendly URLs article on the Internet. Unfortunately things change, and this article hasn't... until now. I present to you the newly updated and expanded search engine friendly URLs article.
On today's Internet database driven or dynamic sites are very popular. So, what's the problem with that? There is also the issue of session IDs, which won't really be covered here but need mentioned. You should also be concerned with user friendliness. Making your URLs search engine friendly is the practice of removing your query string and using meaningful identifiers for your pages. All 4 methods potentially make use of Apache's .htaccess file. Permalink. A permalink (portmanteau of permanent link) is a URL that points to a specific blog or forum entry after it has passed from the front page to the archives. Because a permalink remains unchanged indefinitely, it is less susceptible to link rot. Most modern weblogging and content-syndication software systems support such links. Other types of websites use the term permanent links, but the term permalink is most common within the blogosphere.
Permalinks are often simply rendered so as to be human-readable. History[edit] Originally, all hyperlinks were permalinks, as content was static. Purpose[edit] Permanence in links is desirable when content items are likely to be linked to, from, or cited by a source outside the originating organization. For example, Wikipedia's internal cgi-based URLs are made more readable by simplifying them. An entry in a blog with many entries is accessible from the site's front page for only a short time.
Permalinks and versions[edit] Presentation[edit] Clean URL. Clean URLs, RESTful URLs, user-friendly URLs or SEO-friendly URLs are purely structural URLs that do not contain a query string [e.g., action=delete&id=91] and instead contain only the path of the resource (after the scheme [e.g., http] and the authority [e.g., example.org]). This is often done for aesthetic, usability, or search engine optimization (SEO) purposes.[1] Other reasons for designing a clean URL structure for a website or web service include ensuring that individual web resources remain under the same URL for years, which makes the World Wide Web a more stable and useful system,[2] and to make them memorable, logical, easy to type, human-centric, and long-lived.[3] Examples[edit] Examples of "unclean" versus "clean" URLs follow: Reasoning and common practices[edit] The most often cited reasons for using clean URLs is for search engine optimization, but clean URLs can also greatly improve usability and accessibility.
Slug[edit] See also[edit] Inline linking. Inline linking (also known as hotlinking, leeching, piggy-backing, direct linking, offsite image grabs) is the use of a linked object, often an image, from one site by a web page belonging to a second site. The second site is said to have an inline link to the site where the object is located. Inline linking and HTTP[edit] The technology behind the World Wide Web, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), does not make any distinction of types of links—all links are functionally equal. Resources may be located on any server at any location. When a browser downloads an HTML page containing such an image, the browser will contact the remote server to request the image content. Common uses of linked content[edit] The ability to display content from one site within another is part of the original design of the Web's hypertext medium.
Controversial uses of inline linking[edit] The blurring of boundaries between sites can lead to other problems when the site violates users' expectations. Rewrite engine. Usage[edit] but can be rewritten as: A blog might have a URL that encodes the dates of each entry: It can be altered like this: which also allows the user to change the URL to see all postings available in December, simply by removing the text encoding the day '19', as though navigating "up" a directory: A site can pass specialized terms from the url to its search engine as a search term. Term Will be urlencoded by the browser before it makes the http request. Benefits and drawbacks[edit] There are several benefits to using a rewrite engine for URLs:[1] In this case, the original query string was more useful, since the query variables indicated month and day: Web frameworks[edit]
Writing Custom Session Handlers. Session are a tool which helps the web programmer overcome the stateless nature of the internet. You can use them to build shopping carts, monitor visits to a website, and even track how a user navigates through your application. PHP’s default session handling behavior can provide all you need in most cases, but there may be times when you want to expand the functionality and store session data differently. This article will show you how the default functionality works and then goes on to show you how override it to provide a custom solution. The Anatomy of Session Storage Before you implement a custom session save handler, it’s helpful to understand how PHP stores session data normally. The data is saved in a small file on the server which is associated with a unique ID which is then stored in a cookie on the client by the browser.
The output will be the path to where the session data is stored. The output is a pseudo-random string of 32 characters, much like the following: Summary.