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Home / Joomla URLs / Funny SEF Advance URL 
Jun
29
2008

Funny SEF Advance URL

Written by Steve Burge   
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We use SEF Advance here on Alledia because it was the best option when we launched 2 years ago. It still does a good job but it does produce some strange URLs sometimes, particular when puncutuation is involved.


Heres a funny example of a URL seen in Firefox 3, caused by a hyphen and quotation mark. It looks like Space Invaders have taken over our URLs:


Funny SEF Advance URL

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Your Comments (13)

kesepian
Kesepian Loneliest
June 29, 2008

And two types of slash:/ and ...

bzsolt
Zsolt Boda
June 29, 2008

Jesus! smilies/smiley.gif

emir
Emir Sakic
June 29, 2008

SEF Advance encodes the URL and special characters become ,  etc. Firefox 3 decodes the URL so it's shown in the raw form, it's not how the search engines see them.

You can always use title alias or manual alias if you want to skip special characters.
SEF Advance doesn't strip special characters automatically because it is the only pure logic SEF solution for Joomla! / Mambo. This means it doesn't store URLs in database or anywhere else. This requires that no part of the URL is missing but also does that it is supreme in its performance since it never deals with issues with huge database tables, indexing issues, double entries, slow db connections etc.

goodwebpractices
David Towers
June 29, 2008

LOL! Yeah I noticed that in the post Steve! I thought it was maybe just something on my computer - but yeah it all makes sense now as I'm on Firefox 3 too!

jlleblanc
Joseph LeBlanc
June 29, 2008

There's a page on my site about the Podcast Suite that does this as well. And yes, I use SEF Advance.

0
Przemek
June 29, 2008

yeah, i don't like this strange sign

0
Przemek
June 29, 2008

yeah, i don't like this strange sign in firefox....

steve
Steve Burge
June 29, 2008

Emir is completely right when he says that this can be avoided. Its something that other people can avoid by learning from our mistake smilies/smiley.gif

Nowadays we always use the title alias for URLs. We put a really short and sweet URL in there with no punctuation and no extra words like "and" or "it"

Emir - could this be avoided for other people by setting the default version of SEF Advance to skip more punctuation?

emir
Emir Sakic
June 29, 2008

As I explained in previous post, you can't completely skip the characters from the long title because of the nature of SEF Advance internal working, being a logic based and not database storage dependent SEF solution.

In the on-the-fly conversion the whole article title must be passed in URL in order for SEF Advance to retrieve the article id. If some parts of the title, like punctuation, would be missing from the URL, the program would not be able to find the article.
In a DB based solutions the URLs are saved in database automatically and then it doesn't matter how the URL looks like, it can be with stripped special chars, but then it comes with all performance drawbacks.

In SEF Advance there are 3 ways to avoid having encoded characters, aka strange chars in URL:

1) Put a replacement for a special character under "URL replace" in SEF Advance configurations.
In this example, since you use hyphen as word separator, the regular hyphens are URL encoded. To avoid that you could put something like "-=>_". This way all hyphens that occur in article titles will get replaced by underscores, thus avoiding hyphen shown as "Space Invader" in FF3. Of course, then you can't have underscores in your titles but they are less often occuring.

2) Use short URLs (title alias) setting.
Then you are required to always enter a short version of your article title with latin chars only. This is also the best option for non-latin sites like russian, chinese, arabic etc.

3) Define manual alias.
Whereever you notice strange URL you can manually enter the alias for that URL and it will be used instead. Of course, this solution is not automatic.

marikas
Mark Simpson
June 30, 2008

:O they look like candles.

Emir could sell this as a feature...

New! Exclusive to SEFAdvance! - "Website having a birthday... celebrate in style with candles in your URL's! smilies/grin.gif

kesepian
Kesepian Loneliest
June 30, 2008

Mark you're funny!

steve
Steve Burge
June 30, 2008

Just to confirm, this isn't just a SEF Advance oddity. Here's an example on FF3 with Hindi characters:

0
Emanuele Vedova
October 13, 2009

SEFAdvance is simply the best for me now smilies/grin.gif

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