Blogging - The Directory and URL Structure

A blog, by tradition, is an online journal. We write the posts, and when we enable post titles, we choose the post titles. When we enable post pages and post titles, the URLs of the posts are a function of the dates, and the titles, of the posts.

We can choose the titles of the posts, but the Blogger post editor chooses the URLs. This is a key component in the Blogger Infrastructure. The static page editor ("Edit Pages") uses the same engine as the Post Editor, and Static Pages (aka "Pages") use a similar basic URL structure.

Here's the title of this post

Blogging - The Directory and URL Structure

Here's the URL of this post

blogging.nitecruzr.net/2009/08/blogging-directory-and-url-structure.html

• blogging.nitecruzr.net - The blog URL.
• 2009 - The year of the post, when originally published.
• 08 - The month of the post, when originally published.
• blogging-directory-and-url-structure - The original title, compressed.

Here's the title of one static page in this blog

Leave Comments Here

Here's the URL of the static page

http://blogging.nitecruzr.net/p/leave-comments-here.html

• p - The static pages tag
• leave-comments-here - The original title, compressed

When you publish a dynamic or static page, the post or page is given a URL, possibly based upon the title when published. If you later change the title, the URL does not change. If you want to correct the URL to match a changed title, you have to create a new page or post, with the correct title. You can, optionally, redirect one URL to another, within the blog.

Bloggers sometimes like to reuse post titles. If I published a second post in this series, tomorrow, (today being 2009/08/27), I would end up with a possible duplicate URL. Blogger can't let that happen.
Here's the title of tomorrow's hypothetical post

Blogging - The Directory and URL Structure - Part Two

Here's the URL of tomorrow's post

blogging.nitecruzr.net/2009/08/blogging-directory-and-url-structure_28.html

• blogging.nitecruzr.net - The blog URL.
• 2009 - The year of the post, when originally published.
• 08 - The month of the post, when originally published.
• blogging-directory-and-url-structure - The original title, compressed.
• _28 - The suffix, to prevent a duplicate URL.

Having published tomorrow's hypothetical post, I end up with two posts with similar URLs. One post (today's original) has a non suffixed URL, the second (tomorrow's duplicate) has a suffixed URL.

If I were to then delete today's original post, I'd end up with tomorrow's duplicate with a suffixed URL, period. Once you delete a post (or a static page), a new post with that same, identical URL can never be re created - so delete duplicate posts (static pages) very carefully. The post (static page) title table, which controls the suffixing and prevents duplicate (dynamic, or static) page URLs, cannot be manipulated - it is simply there, and we have to live with it.

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