I have been working on a couple of projects lately and they have been taking up all of my time…which is a good thing. However, something that I have wanted to do for a while is to create a few, topic-based blogs, that have a number of knowledgeable contributors providing the content. I know a few people in different industries that I think would be very good and willing to contribute an article or two a week to a topic-based blog like this. One of the side-benefits of creating a multi-author blog is that you might gain acceptance into Google News. I am not going to lie, getting into Google News is one of the long-term goals…kind of a reward and measuring stick for the project. So, in an effort to facilitate our long-term objectives, I have read up a bit on what it takes to get into Google News. Barry Schwartz notes that URL structure is very important if you want your blog or website to gain admittance into Google News. So, I figured I would post an easy way to setup Wordpress so that the URLs are all honkey dorey (is that how you spell that?).

• Make sure you can use the Permalinks functionality of Wordpress by having an .htaccess file in your document root that Wordpress can write to. I do this by making an .htaccess file, chmod’ing it to a+w or 666.
• Update the Permalink structure in the Wordpress Dashboard. Options -> Permalinks
• Set the structure to something like /news/%post_id%.html

You don’t have to use “news” in there, but I did it for show. I also added on a .html extension for fun and to make things a little more “normal” looking to the human eye. People are used to seeing .html on the end of URIs, so give the people what they want.