One of the first things I needed was to get my blog indexed properly with search engines. I generally write a lot of workarounds, and tips and tricks to overcome various bugs or tough situations in software. I plan to write more helpful tutorials and articles on this blog, but still the majority of my readers from referred from google. So anything that will index my pages better is very welcome. One of the first rule is to have better urls. The current method of wordpress ?p=1 to indentify posts, will not suffice.
WordPress does support a lot of options for formatting your permalinks. None of the out of box options served my purpose. On my Yahoo account, I found a plugin called Customizable Permalinks already activated. I could access the options from Options -> Permalinks menu. The date and name based, came very close to what I wanted, but still not very user friendly as it has a lot of sub folders. Again it was Emily Robbins to my rescue with her article on configuring wordpress to create search engine friendly links. It was exactly what I wanted. The custom format of /%postname%.htm worked very well. But then it instructed that I have to edit my .htaccess file and add a bit of code to make sure everything works properly. Here I came across a snag with Yahoo. Their file manager did not show the .htaccess file, now did it let me create or upload one as the filename begain with a ".". So I was stuck. Having paid for the yahoo account just yesterday understanding that it was the best option for advanced wordpress configurations, I was a bit taken aback with this limitations. Have mailed Yahoo support regarding it, but unfortunately as the mail id they provide is yahoo based, it is blocked from the network here. Will have to check from home to see what they say.
However I think I found a way to overcome that limitation. I cannot loging to my account using direct ftp from this place due to firewall issues, so cannot confirm if it will work or not. Yahoo online help pages say that they currently do not allow .htaccess files to be uploaded.
Will write about how I overcame this limitation a bit later. At least I think I did, but that only time will tell.
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