When I was trying out latest features of Blogger, I didn’t think much about Custom Redirection. The only uses I had are for when you delete a page or a post, or you re-post with typo correction.

1   For a page or a post

Last a couple of day, I realized we can do more with it. For example, many bloggers have About page, as you know the pages on Blogger have slightly different URL path, which is:


/p/page-slug-name.html

I will bet some people dislike /p, least to say, and probably page-slug-name.html as well. With redirection, you can set up one or all of the following as redirected URLs:


/PageSlugName
/page-slug-name
/Page%20Slug%20Name

Imagine, you have /About instead of this awkward /p/about.html. It is easier to type. The last one redirects when a URL like /Page Slug Name is entered, the browsers will automatically to convert space to %20 to meet the specification.

As for post, it’s the best way to get rid of /????/??/blah.html. If you have some outstanding post, create a redirection for it with an easy memorable name for yourself.

2   For an index

I recently started two series which is labeled with special labels Song of the Day and Bash Scripting Made Easy. On blogger, you can click on a label and get all posts which are labeled with it. That feature is part of searching functional and its URL is little longer. For instance:


https://yjlv.blogspot.com/search/label/Song%20of%20the%20Day

With the redirection, I can shorten it to just:


https://yjlv.blogspot.com/SotD

Isn’t that much easier to remember and to type when you want to share with friends. You don’t need to find the post and copy the link. You just type in.

3   For a label feed

You can also shorten the URL of a label feed, which is way too long and no one can ever memorize it:


https://yjlv.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?category=Bash%20Scripting%20Made%20Easy

to:


https://yjlv.blogspot.com/BSME-Feed

4   For bizarre URLs

In Google Webmaster Tools, it offers you a report of 404 URLs, which are linked from within your website, for example:

2012-03-26--12:45:32

I know some of them are parsed from inline JavaScript, which I embed in posts. The Googlebot really works to hard to find links which may not even be valid ones.

I can either obscure the link look-alike in JavaScript, which requires me editing and I don’t want to; or I can set up a redirection for it to get rid of the error reports. (Or just leave it there, I chose this way ;)

5   Final thought

You can redirect anything to anything, that about sums it up.