SoylentNews / rehash

Forked from Slashcode, rehash is the codebase that powers SoylentNews.org, powered by mod_perl 2
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SEO: Include Title in Article Links #125

Open paulej72 opened 9 years ago

paulej72 commented 9 years ago

From @phonique on June 11, 2014 7:25

Just what the title says, links to articles should include the topic, besides the date.

Copied from original issue: SoylentNews/slashcode#226

paulej72 commented 9 years ago

From @NCommander on June 16, 2014 6:36

I'm not exactly sure what you're suggesting here, can you be slightly more clear? Are you referring to the actual URL itself?

paulej72 commented 9 years ago

From @phonique on June 16, 2014 15:34

Yes, the actual article URL should be search-engine-friendly (and user-readable), as is the de-facto standard for most wCMS systems since after PHPNuke.

This is not critical, but really nice to have IMO.

paulej72 commented 9 years ago

From @lhsi on June 24, 2014 12:31

The one benefit a non-search-engine human would have that I can think of is if there is a link to a previous story in a new story. Hovering over the link will show the title in a web browser without having to click on the link.

paulej72 commented 9 years ago

Set the title attribute on the a tags to the title of the story. Makes it better for screen readers I thinks as well. Should be and easy fix for most of the pages. Just a few template changes.

marty-b commented 9 years ago

1.) Adding the title attribute would certainly help screen readers and I think it is a worthy addition. 2.) For examples of what I think the original submitter is suggesting, take a look at the URLs in the #rss-bot channel on IRC. 3.) For a concrete example; this story is currently on the main page: https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=15/06/22/0315220 which, for me, is not terribly informative nor readily distinguishable from all other story links on our site. Looking at that, I have no idea what the story is about. When I actually follow that link, I see that the story title is: Ask Soylent: Are There Any Decent Phonewatches Out There? So, I would like to see something along these lines as the presented link URL: https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=15/06/22/0315220&title=ask-soylent-are-there-any-decent-phonewatches-out-there NOTE: This is admittedly just 'eye candy' for the user; on receiving such a link, we'd just parse and ignore the "&title=blah-blah-blah" portion of the URL, but when presenting a URL from the DB, we can add the &title arg (cuts down on 'rick-rolling' opportunities) 4.) Something like this should get you most of the way there: echo $title | tr "[A-Z]" "[a-z]" | sed "s/[[:punct:]]/ /g; s/[[:space:]]*/-/g;" but watch for leading/trailing punctuation when done!