Software Cruft and Hacks
So, the many people who aren't interested in the finer points of blog software geekery might want to go ahead and skip this post.
With the advent of easy to use weblogging tools and various Content Management Systems (CMS) such as Greymatter, Movable Type (which runs this site), WordPress, TextPattern (insert favorite software here) you necessarily trade advantages of handcoding for features inherent in the software - such ease of use, oodles of saved time, and standard methodology among other features. But sometimes the limitations of the software become apparent.
So I am sure everyone has at one time or the other dealt with post titles and how to accurately title them to use for as the post URL. It is much better to dispense with post ID as URL and use some form of text URL so that it is both human- and machine-readable. So that instead of a post URL of
http://www.yoursite.com/archives/YYYY/MM/DD/XXXXXX.html
where XXXXXX is the post ID
you would get this:
http://www.yoursite.com/archives/YYYY/MM/DD/nice_title.html
Specifically Mark Pilgrim's Cruft-Free MT URL's is one of the best tutorials illustrating how you can break <$MTEntryTitle$> from the final URL (i.e. - foo.extension) so that if you misspell the title, you can re-title the post and not break post URL. The only problem is that it uses <$MTEntryKeywords$> in order to create the non-crufty URL (foo.extension (or no extension if that floats your boat)) which I thought was nifty because I didn't use that field.
Yet, I always thought Mark's solution was hack, an elegant hack, but it was a hack which served a purpose not inherent in the software. Now comes along tags, which are all the rage, and Technorati's answer to the LazyWeb request and came up with their own version of the Taggerator which tries to combine del.icio.us, flickr and weblog Tags together in a Folksonomy.
So I want my cake and eat it too. I want to combine Mark's "Non-Crufty URL's" and use the without using the Keyword's field or the title field or the Excerpt field. In a perfect world, what I really want is the ability to add another form field on the "New Entry" page for URL, thus allowing proper use of the post title field, keywords field - which can be used by Technorati, and set the excerpt field. Each field would work independently so no more URL hack. I always thought that the cool thing about MT 3.x was that developers could extend the interface with additional items/fields. Or did I just make that up? In a really perfect world, I would want to be able to add multiple additional data fields as I please and those fields would work blog-wide (or even MT-wide).
I know of the ExtraFields plugin or Brad Choate's Key Values Plugin. But those solutions also feel like hacks, because how one deals with the data in a crufty-way.
So LazyWeb, what do you say?
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