Where digg gets it wrong, URLs and Archives

[tpiddy]

Heres my suggestion on what could help make a killer digg-clone.

First look at the typical Digg URL
http://digg.com/science/The_Science_...adly_invisible look how long that is, and Mr. Matt Cutts (from Google) has blogged about how you shouldn't use _ as a seperator because - is a much better seperator in the search engine's eyes.

My advice is to have urls like http://pliggsite/category/url-friendly-title remove words like a,an,the,and,or,of,for and hyphonate the rest.

Also a cool URL mod would be to have http://category.pliggsite.com/url-friendly-title

[tpiddy]

An easy compromise could be http://pliggsite.com/category/#/url-friendly-title
whire # is the article id number

[Laurent]

I pretty much agree with 1 thing you said, changing the _ into -. I've read about it as well.. so yea..

[3dKiller]

I definately agree with the "-". Google does prefer the hyphen vs underscore.

[AshDigg]

Ok, this will be an easy enough fix. I'll release a version with these friendly URL's soon.

[AshDigg]

ok, here is the current code (modified for "-" instead of "_")

// Replace spaces with underscores
$output = preg_replace("/\s/e" , "-" , $input);

// Remove non-word characters
$output = preg_replace("/\W/e" , "" , $output);

Can someone give me a hand with preg_replace to remove "a,an,the,and,or,of,for"?

thanks!

[j0zf]

Try this

//Remove common words
$output = preg_replace( '/(-a-|-an-|-the-|-and-|-or-|-of-|-for-)/i', '-', $output );

l8r,
Joe

[caomhin]

Originally Posted by j0zf

$output = preg_replace( '/(-a-|-an-|-the-|-and-|-or-|-of-|-for-)/i', '-', $output );

But that's readable, everyone knows you should make them obscure

/-(an?d?|f?o(r|f)|the)-/i

Or it might be useful to call this before the hyphenation so:

/\b(an?d?|f?o(r|f)|the)\b/i

[Laurent]

Originally Posted by AshDigg

ok, here is the current code (modified for "-" instead of "_")

// Replace spaces with underscores
$output = preg_replace("/\s/e" , "-" , $input);

// Remove non-word characters
$output = preg_replace("/\W/e" , "" , $output);

Can someone give me a hand with preg_replace to remove "a,an,the,and,or,of,for"?

thanks!

I wonder if you could get rid of the '?' and have the category name included in the url?

[AshDigg]

Thank you "j0zf" and "caomhin".

You can now see the results of this at http://ashtest1.pligg.com