Sep 25

Written by:
9/25/2009 8:02 PM 

Sometimes you just need a short (or shorter URL).  And when you do, it never fails to wind up being a very long URL with several parameters.  For instance, if I wanted to direct you to this blog entry the normal URL would be http://www.hardyconsulting.com/AboutUs/DotNetNuke/AllThingsDotNetNuke/tabid/294/EntryId/7/DotNetNuke-short-URLs.aspx

If you think about trying to tell some one this, you can forget them remembering how to get directly there.  If you are tweeting, you give them a shorten URL like http://bit.ly/17vo3w , but that hides where the link is going, and many people are reluctant to follow links like this unless they are familiar with the tweeter.

There are several ways to “skin-this-cat”.  We could use a third party URL re-writing tool, or IIS re-writer. Another possibility would be a friendly URL Regex or possibly even a Request Filter Rule.  HOWEVER! there is a very easy way to accomplish this.  Even DNN novices can do this.

Issue: I want to have a short URL for my blog listing, and a short URL for my most recent blog so that I can tweet about them and keep my domain name listed for search engines.
Solution: Create a page with a short URL and link it to the actual page.  For instance, my “All Things DotNetNuke” is buried in my menu structure.  To have a short URL that people can remember I just create a page at the root level called blogs.  (www.HardyConsulting.com/blogs.aspx)  When creating this page, I carefully do the following:

1. Make sure “Include in Menu?” is UNchecked.
   
2. Make sure “All Users” can view page
3. Under “Advanced Settings” go to the “Other Settings” area and locate the”Link Url”.  For this part of the example, select “Page ( A Page On Your Site )” and select the page your blog module is on.
    
4. Depending on how you want search engines to deal with this you can check or leave “Permanently Redirect?” unchecked.

All the rest of your page settings can pretty much be ignored. 

The effect is that when you go to www.hardyconsulting.com/blogs.aspx it will actually land you on the “All Things DotNetNuke” page.

You say Great! but the page with the actual blog on it is not available in the dropdown. How do I direct to the actual blog?  This problem arises because of the parameters used to show the actual blog. Again this is easy:

1. Create a page called Blog, or latestblog, or whatever you want.
2. Follow steps one and two above.
3. For the third step, select “URL ( A Link To An External Resource )” and paste the actual URL (parameters and all) in the text box provided.
   

Now you can type in www.HardyConsulting.com/blog.aspx and get to http://www.hardyconsulting.com/AboutUs/DotNetNuke/AllThingsDotNetNuke/tabid/294/EntryId/7/DotNetNuke-short-URLs.aspx

 

 

EASY!

Two negative points:

1. In the last example you would need to update the link every time you publish a new blog that you wanted to emphasize.  It will NOT automatically go to the latest blog.
2. You can easily let this get out of control and have a mess of root pages to deal with even though they don’t show up on the menu.

It is easy for those of us who have been dealing with DNN for years to forget that these simple things can make life easier for those that have never seen them in use.  This may not be the BEST way to accomplish these goals, but it is something that a non-programmer or someone that does not know about Regex can do in less than 5 minutes. 

If you have a way to get to the latest blog without having to go back and change something every time you post a new blog (especially if it is EASY),  Leave a comment and tell us all about it!