04 July 2012

Custom permalinks for Blogger posts

Custom permalinks for Blogger posts now in Blogger in DraftAfter Blogger retired the ‘In Draft’ blog, news about new features being tested are hard to come by. The Google+ page usually posts tips referring to current functionality; for me Twitter has proven a much better source of news as people post their questions and new things they stumble on. This is how I found out a couple of days ago that Blogger now lets you customize the URL of your blog post.

Naturally, as I write this the option is available only in Blogger in Draft: when composing a new post you will see a new section in the ‘Post settings’ sidebar on the right called ‘Permalink’. You can either leave the URL on the ‘Automatic’ setting, so Blogger assigns a URL based on the title just like before, or choose ‘Custom URL’ and type in a different title, to make it shorter or to highlight some terms – after all, this is one of the top requests of SEO-aware bloggers. You can only customize the very last part of the post URL, the structure before it (blog name/year/month/) is still generated automatically by Blogger. It’s worth noting that, once the article is published, the URL cannot be changed anymore, so pick yours carefully.

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