Hacker News Reader

Comment by evansolomon | Hacker News Reader

It's ironic that a post about URL tidiness would be here: http://reillybrennan.com/post/7686471401/even-a-url-tells-a-...

View on HN

That's tumblr's URL scheme, and I don't believe there's any way for the user to change it.

Which might be a reason to avoid using something you can't control.

Aside from maybe removing the numeric ID, is that url that bad?

A better URL would be http://reillybrennan.com/2011/even-a-url-tells-a-story - stick the year in there to get a fresh namespace every 12 months so as not to end up with collisions some day.

I can see going either way with or without the year, but not for the reason you stated. If you are writing the exact same title for a blog post then the year should probably be in the actual title because that most likely is an important piece of the article (thinking "Resolutions - 2011"). The reason I might include a year in the path is just to let users know quickly how old the material is when they see a link to your article, but then again do you really want to let them know that before click into your site?

I like using years for namespaces because I like thinking long-term - in 50 years time, will that site's namespace be getting too busy? Using years means you can even completely change the rest of your URL scheme without needing to update last year's URLs.

Quickly letting users use the age of the article is a good reason too, but only for blog-style content. I don't think you should use the year trick with evergreen content (example.com/2010/terms-of-service for example).

example.com/2010/terms-of-service would still be a good URL for the namespace reforming reasons you cited.

Why include /post/ if the blog is on the root domain?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com