When I started designing Jottings, I knew tags would be essential. They're how you organize your thoughts, discover patterns, and let others find what matters to you.

But there's a problem nobody talks about: how do you turn a tag like "Coffee & Code ☕" into something that works in a URL?

That's slugification.

What Is Slugification?

A "slug" is the human-readable part of a URL. When you tag a jot "Python Tips," the slug becomes /tag/python-tips/. When you tag something "Productivity," the slug is /tag/productivity/.

Slugification is the process of converting messy, human-friendly text into clean, URL-safe strings.

The Rules Jottings Uses

At Jottings, we apply three simple transformations to every tag:

1. Lowercase Everything

Tags are case-insensitive. Whether you write "Python Tips," "PYTHON TIPS," or "python tips," they all become the same slug: python-tips.

This matters because Python-Tips and python-tips would be treated as different URLs. That would split your content across two pages, which defeats the purpose of tagging.

Our approach: normalize to lowercase. One tag, one page.

2. Replace Spaces with Hyphens

Spaces don't exist in URLs (technically, they become %20, which is ugly). So we replace them with hyphens.

"Deep Work" becomes deep-work. "Startup Ideas" becomes startup-ideas.

Hyphens are the semantic choice here. They're readable, they separate words visually, and search engines treat them as word boundaries. Win-win-win.

3. Remove Special Characters (Mostly)

This is where it gets interesting. What happens to "Coffee & Code ☕"?

Special characters like &, !, ?, @, #, $, %, ^, etc. are removed entirely. The emoji goes too.

So "Coffee & Code ☕" becomes coffee-code.

We keep hyphens and underscores because they're already URL-safe and useful for word separation. Everything else gets stripped.

Why This Matters

You might wonder: why strip characters instead of replacing them?

Readability: coffee-and-code is longer than coffee-code. We favor brevity.

Consistency: If someone types &, another types "and," and a third uses nothing—should these be three different tags? Our slugification ensures they're all one tag. One concept. One page.

Simplicity: The fewer special characters in a URL, the fewer encoding issues you'll encounter. URLs with & become %26. URLs with emoji become gibberish. Clean is better.

Examples from the Wild

Here's how real tags transform:

What If Two Tags Slugify the Same Way?

This can happen. Imagine:

• Tag 1: "Machine Learning"
• Tag 2: "Machine-Learning"

After slugification, both become machine-learning.

Jottings treats these as the same tag. Your content is organized together, not scattered.

This is a feature, not a bug. Tags are about intent, not exact spelling. If you mean the same concept, Jottings unifies them.

URL Structure in Action

When you tag a jot with "Productivity," here's what happens behind the scenes:

1. You submit the tag "Productivity"
2. Slugification creates productivity
3. The build system generates /tag/productivity/ on your site
4. All jots with that tag appear on that page
5. Your visitors access yoursite.jottings.me/tag/productivity/

If you later tag something with "PRODUCTIVITY" or "productivity," it points to the exact same page. No duplication. No confusion.

Tag Pages and Tag Clouds

Every unique tag gets its own page. Visit /tag/python-tips/ and you'll see all your Python-related thoughts, in reverse chronological order, with pagination.

We also generate a /tags/ page showing all your tags in a cloud layout—larger tags for topics you write about more, smaller ones for occasional interests.

This is pure static HTML. No JavaScript required. No database queries. Just fast, indexable pages that search engines love.

Why This Approach?

Many blogging platforms let tag URLs have special characters, numbers, and mixed case. It works technically, but it's messy.

Jottings slugifies because we believe in clarity. A slug should be:

• Readable at a glance: Can you say it aloud? Does it make sense?
• Shareable: Can you paste it in a chat without worrying about encoding?
• Indexable: Do search engines understand it?
• Future-proof: Will this URL work in 10 years on any system?

Slugification ensures all four.

What If I Want a Different Slug?

You don't need one. The whole point of slugification is that the URL handles the messy human input.

You tag creatively. We make it URL-safe. Everyone wins.

The Big Picture

Tags are how your ideas become discoverable. Slugification is the invisible infrastructure that makes discovery work.

When you tag "Deep Work," "Deep-Work," or "DEEP WORK"—you're not creating three different categories. You're expressing one idea in three different ways. Our slugs translate that noise into signal.

It's a small detail, but these details compound. Clean URLs mean better SEO. Better SEO means your writing reaches more people. More readers mean more connections.

And that's what Jottings is built for: your ideas, organized simply, shared widely.

Ready to start tagging? Create a Jottings site and tag freely. We'll handle the slugs.