This week on the Web has led me to several worthwhile technological discoveries. While I would have been—to plagiarize a Blackadderism—as excited as a very excited person who has a special reason to be excited to write about, say, running JavaScript-based macros in a Google Drive spreadsheet or editing live CSS with the User CSS extension for Safari, I’ve chosen instead to expound upon creating reader-friendly URLs in WordPress—a nicely self-referential topic when you consider that DavidSmithWeb (hereafter “DSW” if you’ll pardon the mock legalese) is itself based on WP.
A decided (and, in my experience, uncharacteristic for WP) awkwardness I encountered upon deploying my WP site for the first time was the decidedly unglamorous URLs the platform created for my pages. Here, for instance, is the URL it generated for my main blog page:
//www.davidsmithweb.com/?page_id=58
And here’s the one it generated for my last blog post:
//www.davidsmithweb.com/?p=72
Deeply unattractive, I’m sure you’ll agree. So how did I go about making them more appealing?
It all started with a little tweaking of my Apache configuration. I first needed to make sure my server’s rewrite module was available. The “mod_rewrite” module, as it’s known, “provides a rule-based rewriting engine to rewrite requested URLs on the fly,” according to the Apache documentation. While the specifics of the rewriting process are beyond the scope of this post (that, and I don’t yet know enough about regular expressions!), checking for and enabling the module was fairly straightforward. For a list of available Apache modules, I went to my command line and navigated to the “mods-available” directory:
cd /etc/apache2/mods-available
There I found. as expected, a file named “rewrite.load.”
I then enabled the module by returning to the command line and entering the a2enmod command followed by the name of the relevant module:
a2enmod rewrite
(Entering the “load” file extension appeared to be unnecessary.)
In order for the enabling to take effect I found it was also necessary to restart Apache. From the command line I did it thus:
service apache2 restart
I then navigated to the “mods-enabled” directory to confirm the module had indeed been enabled, i.e., that the “rewrite.load” file was present in the directory:
cd /etc/apache2/mods-enabled
With my command line duties done (at least for the time being), I then turned to the more aesthetically pleasing—if not quite as nerdy—WP administrative interface. WP conveniently offers the ability to create reader-friendly URLs via its “Permalink Settings” screen (under Settings > Permalinks). While the more adventurous WP users among us may wish to choose custom URL structures, the less daring may content themselves with the several predefined options WP offers. Ever the pioneer, I chose the following custom structure:
/blog/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/
The only slight inconvenience I encountered here was that I needed to make my “.htaccess” file writable by WP. To wit, I returned once more to the command line, navigated to my site’s public folder, and gave the “.htaccess” file full read-write permissions:
chmod 666 .htaccess
I then returned to WP to save the changes to my site’s permalink settings. Finally I returned to the command line to reinstate the “.htaccess” file’s original permissions:
chmod 644 .htaccess
And that, as they say, was that. Remember those dowdy-looking URLs we encountered at the top of the post? Let’s have a look at them now! Here’s the URL for my main blog page:
//www.davidsmithweb.com/blog/
And here’s the one for my last blog post:
//www.davidsmithweb.com/blog/2013/01/1password-the-summit-of-password-managers/
Much more enticing, I’m sure you’ll agree.
Note 1: At the command line I needed superuser privileges in order to tinker with my Apache configuration to the extent that was necessary, i.e., I preceded each command with sudo.
Note 2: Here are some details of my current system configuration, in case they’re helpful:
- Ubuntu 12.04
- Apache 2.2.22
- WordPress 3.4
Note 3: Mileage may vary with the specific commands and directory structures described in this post.