If you cannot tell, this is a long, long, titled post. Reading the title alone may b a bit like listening to the Chicken, Chicken, Chicken talk.
If I were to use the WordPress Permalink settings for day and name:
/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/
the URL for this post would be:
http://thoughts.extendlabs.ca/2018/08/21/that-thing-that-happens-in-the-lab-when-you-mix-the-wrong-elements-together-and-people-are-watching/
Wow, that is long.
Even if I went shorter for the Post name format
/%postname%/
my url would be:
http://thoughts.extendlabs.ca/that-thing-that-happens-in-the-lab-when-you-mix-the-wrong-elements-together-and-people-are-watching/
which is ginormous.
But below the title, I can actually edit the permalink so it is shorter:
or
http://thoughts.extendlabs.ca/2018/08/21/that-thing-that-happens/
That’s fine if we remember to edit the permalink. But if I really do not care if any words in my title are part of the permalink, I could use the Numeric format:
/archives/%post_id%/
but we are timely around here. We like the idea of the URL showing the year a post was written, but want short links, so we could use
/%year%/idea/%post_id%/
which makes the URL include the year it was published and a reference that this was idea number 84 (the number is the database ID for the post)
The link now is in the world as:
http://thoughts.extendlabs.ca/2018/idea/84/
We like that idea.