If like me, you are sometimes adding content created elsewhere to a WordPress blog (in my case adding new articles to the website of a journalist client of mine), you might find yourself simply cutting and pasting the content and title into the WordPress write post form.

One thing that has slightly miffed me is that I can sometimes place the cursor in the title field and then, for whatever reason, I might move it elsewhere, say to the post body etc. This may not seem like a big issue, but the permalink (the url given to the WordPress post) can sometimes contain the words of your post title (this is often good for SEO purposes). This permalink is updated when you move your cursor from the title field to somewhere else on the page. It then takes the title and created a search engine friendly url with those words.

If you either did not put in the correct title, or as I often do, did not put in anything, the permalink may not therefore contain exactly what you want it to (you will see a preview of it in grey directly underneath the title field).

Up to now, I found this quite annoying as I had to then click the edit link and edit the permalink manually. Simply updating the title will not change the permalink. This might seem trivial, but WordPress automatically formats the permalink for search engine consumption, removing punctuation marks and placing dashes between words. Doing this manually is a pain.

There is a fast and easy workaround:

1) Put the correct title into the title field
2) Click the permalink edit link
3) Hit ctrl A, then delete to select all and delete from that field
4) Hit save

And hey presto, instead of a blank permalink, it then goes back to the title field and takes your updated title.