Making individual blog entry URL-s in non-English languages more searchengine-friendly
Here’s a tip from a Japanese colleague. By default, individual entry filenames in Movable Type are generated based on the entry title which are “dirified” — non-ASCII characters are taken out. If the title only consists of them, say Japanese glyphs, the title becomes something like entry-x.html. Which is not very friendly.
Turns out you can configure the individual entry template to be generated from keywords which you can then use to indicate the content of the post in English. Here’s a blog post about this. I have no idea what it talks about, but there’s this critical line:
<$MTEntryDate format="%Y/%m/%d"$>/<$MTEntryKeywords$>.html
Just copypaste this into your “Individual Archive Entry” file path under Settings, Publishing (change first to Custom) and it works. Funny thing is that the Movable Type manual says nothing about how you can use MT tags in those filenames and only talks about a limited set of variables. But using the tags seems to work. Cool.
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