Here’s something I only found out a few days ago when I was completing another post. Usually, I’ll lay out almost everything just as I like it, including the post’s title before I publish for the first time. However, on that day, as I was looking at the page on the web after I had Publish-ed, some stirring in the alignment of the stars caused me to change the post’s title.

The new title was right. It would work. And, no one would have to get nailed to anything.

That might have been the end of that were it not for the requirement to update my Visual Archive. For, you see, it was there, the examination of that page, where I saw that the blog’s title didn’t match it’s hyperlink. Now you remember, back in the old days of iWeb, URL’s took on the name of the page except in the case of blog posts. For those, Apple used a really, really, really long number as the URL for those pages. It’s called a GUID (that’s Globally Unique IDentifier if you want to look it up). That made posts unwieldy for copy/paste and the URL gave no indication as to what the post was about. The update took care of that, though, and now blog posts get their own page names, but with a twist that you may be able to use to your advantage.

On the page I was referring to above, when I did my first Publish, iWeb created and uploaded the html with my initial title Tiny_Little_Images. When I went back and changed the title to Tiny_Little_Klondike_Cardbacks (being the fan of alliteration that I am), I had expected the URL for the page to change, but it didn’t! iWeb did not change the post’s URL to match the title. This is a good thing because it means that if someone has bookmarked your page (or Google has successfully found it’s way to it) and you go into a past post to rename a title, the link to your page will still work!

Taking this one step further, if you know beforehand that you want to use a really long title (say, for the humor of it) BUT you don’t want to end up with a really long URL, then you can do what I did for this page.

1) Create the page but give it a short title

2) Publish

3) Retype the long (and possibly absurd) title

4) Publish

And that’s just how simple it was. Another idea I’d like to toss out there is that you can prepare it so that the URL sent to friends and family sets up a joke, and the title on the page (and the post itself, of course) can be the punch line. I’ll leave you now to come up with your own variations. I’ve got a plane to catch and I need to work up a good running start... those things are QUICK!