The only thing worse than dealing with all that physical paper is having to scan it, create pdfs from it, upload it or email it!

When I was dealing with only a small amount of paperwork, scanning things on a flatbed scanner one page at a time was painful and time-consuming.  As business picked up and I began dealing with more paper, the flatbed approach simply became unmanageable and impractical.

Beyond just scanning, there was the necessity of keeping all of the scans organized accordingly so I could easily find them again down the road.  The process required a lot of folder management which worked, but made it nearly impossible to cross reference things (e.g. a receipt as both an expense and related to a particular trip and tax year).

I looked into a number of page-feeding scanners, but most of them I read about or tried didn’t handle different document types well and the feeder mechanisms were not refined.  In most cases, they couldn’t handle the volume of paper and easily jammed. They were also slow…

I’d seen the Neat scanners in the airport but was initially turned off by what I perceived as a high price at $399.  Last Fall, I couldn’t take my old scanning method any longer, so I decided to take the plunge.  Since then, I’ve never looked back… in fact I liked it so much I bought a second Neat Desk scanner as a gift.

I don’t review a lot of hardware products here, but I do put a lot of emphasis on simplification, efficiency and time savings.  All of which the Neat system helps.

To begin with, the Neat scanner takes up very little space and looks nice sitting on the desk. It has three feeder slots: one for normal paper sized items, one for receipts and one for business cards.  The feed & scan functionality is incredibly fast, and after about 5 months of use, it has never jammed on me.

Along with the scanner, Neat provides a desktop application (Mac & PC) that works surprisingly well. The software creates a proprietary database of documents you scan in but you can easily export or scan straight to .pdf  (or other formats).  I’m not usually a fan of desktop apps like this one, but the Neat scanner software works extremely well. I’ve found the OCR (optical character recognition) also works well though as a technology (not just with Neat) has room for improvement.

The Neat software also does its best to identify specific fields on documents which is particularly helpful on receipts. It’ll grab things like vendor, date, amount, etc… and index them accordingly so they are easily searchable (and cross reference-able).

I can’t begin tell you how many hours this device has saved me. While it appears a little on the pricey side, it’s definitely the Cadillac of scanners and the time-savings and organizational abilities easily justify the price.

You get what you pay for, and if you need a document scanner that is fast, easy to use, provides efficient cataloging and export, the Neat Desk Scanner is money well spent.

More importantly, if you deal with any amount of paper at all and pick up a Neat scanner, you won’t regret it.

Check out the following video from Neat for more information or get your Neat Scanner at Amazon:

Photo Courtesy Chris Dlugoz, Flickr Creative Commons

Well formed URL’s are important to usability and SEO.

WordPress permalinks give us awesome control over the structure of our base URL’s. Combined with well written headlines, we can create catchy, easy to remember, user friendly URL’s across our site.

However, the base install of WordPress will add the word “category” to your url structure before the actual category name. Having “category” in the middle of your URL is not particularly useful, certainly not pretty and can make URL’s longer and harder to remember.

For example, if you have a category on your site called “Gadgets” you would want the URL to look like this:

http://yoursite.com/gadgets.

The url is so intuitive that someone could just type it in and find what they are looking for.

Unfortunately, without some modification your URL will look like this:

http://yoursite.com/category/gadgets (no-so-intuitive).

The disadvantages of leaving /category/ in are that it is longer and harder to remember and, according to some sources, the deeper keywords are in the URL the less relevant they are from an SEO standpoint. And you do use well thought out keywords for your category names don’t you?

Keep in mind that URL’s are an important part of SEO, though in the big picture they are only one piece of a much larger puzzle. In other words, URL’s alone won’t give you a ton of SEO juice, but they can help, so don’t ignore them either.

In my opinion, usability is the most important issue and the real reason for well formed URL’s.

ESPN is a good example, if I want to know about football, I know I can go to http://espn.com/nfl and get football info. I don’t even have to guess if that’ll get me where I want to be.

There are a couple of ways to get rid of the “/category/” in your WordPress URL’s:

1. Add some code to your .htaccess file (not-recommended)
2. Use a plugin.

Sidebar: .htaccess files allow you to make web server configurations on a per directory basis and allows for decentralized web server configuration, including things like URL rewriting.

Having been a coder, I’m not at all afraid to modify .htaccess but for most I wouldn’t recommend it. Getting it wrong can cause you some serious headache. In this case, a WordPress plugin works extremely well and is headache free.

For the last couple of years I’ve been using “WP No Category Base.” It works flawlessly, is kept up to date and does exactly what we need: it removes “/caegory/” from our category based URL’s and nothing more.

Just download-install-activate and you’re done.

Additional thought: I don’t particularly care for dates in URL’s either, I see them a lot but I’m not inclined to click on yoursite.com/2010/03/ it just doesn’t have meaning.

Download WP No Category Base (free of course) and get started cleaning up your URL’s!

What permalink structure works well for your WordPress site?

Added notes (1/12/2011): Got a tweet from Bill Erickson regarding performance issues with this plugin. I personally have not experienced any performance issues but Bill has, including one site whos page load time increased 100x when the plugin was deactivated. If you use this plugin and experience any latency as a result, deactivate it and see if the problem goes away, then come back here and let me know! As Bill has said, page load time is far more important than one word in a URL. Again, no issues in my usage but keep an eye on it and as with all things WordPress, if you start to have any problems, plugins are the first thing to check.

Bill is a very knowledgable WordPress developer so I’d look him up if you’re in the market for one. You can find him at http://billerickson.com or on twitter @billerickson.