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You’re not thinking very long-term. As the article explains, for long-term resources, your should put some form of date in the URL, such that you do not contin
by teddyh 4y ago
You’re not thinking very long-term. As the article explains, for long-term resources, your should put some form of date in the URL, such that you do not continually deplete the namespace.
For example, suppose that you once wrote an article on AI, in, say, 2008, with the URL
https://www.example.com/a/current-developments-in-ai https://www.example.com/a/current-developments-in-ai
When the subject, in this case AI, suddenly changes in later years, and you want to write an update, you’ll be forced to use this monstrosity of a URL:
https://www.example.com/a/current-developments-in-ai-2 https://www.example.com/a/current-developments-in-ai-2
Why not start with
https://www.example.com/a/2008/current-developments-in-ai https://www.example.com/a/2008/current-developments-in-ai
so that you can then create
https://www.example.com/a/2023/current-developments-in-ai https://www.example.com/a/2023/current-developments-in-ai
? (This will also benefit readers, similarly how HN likes having the year parenthesized in the submitted title.)
- kevin_thibedeau 4y agoYou just made an SEO expert die of a heart attack. They're paranoid about dateable content.
- teddyh 4y agoYou say that like it’s a bad thing.
- MrVandemar 4y agoIf a date is something that helps categorise something in a sane, indexable way, and SEO experts don't like them, they can go and [obscenity] an [animal-noun] with a rusty [ambiguous-from-context] and [illegal-act] and put it in their pipe and smoke it. Metadata matters.
- jefftk 4y agoI'd rather occasionally have an awkward url than need to put the date in every time. I've written ~2k posts and 1% ended up with suffixes like this (ex: https://www.jefftk.com/p/nomic-report-ii https://www.jefftk.com/p/nomic-report-ii). And most of those were published in the same year as the original post anyway.
- crooked-v 4y agoJust give each entry a unique ID and put it in the URL: https://www.example.com/a/abcdefghi/current-developments-in-ai https://www.example.com/a/abcdefghi/current-developments-in-... Then if you ever see the need to shuffle around your site, you can do redirects based on unique ID without needing to keep track of slugs or other metadata.
- wruza 4y agoAlso make it accessible by id only, so that: https://www.example.com/a/abcdefghi/current-davalopments-in-ai https://www.example.com/a/abcdefghi/current-davalopments-in-... https://www.example.com/a/abcdefghi/current-developments-in-ai https://www.example.com/a/abcdefghi/current-developments-in-... https://www.example.com/a/abcdefghi https://www.example.com/a/abcdefghi are all the same.
- teddyh 4y agoBut then what is the title doing in the URL at all, if you’re using IDs? It’s just unnecessary junk; spam in the URL, if you will.
- _dain_ 4y agoWhy not just keep exactly the same address but add an update to the contents?