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Some of these ideas are pretty good, but some are not. To take a couple examples: Here is a concrete example: Someone links to www.catonmat.net/artikle when th
by michael_dorfman 17y ago
Some of these ideas are pretty good, but some are not. To take a couple examples:
Here is a concrete example: Someone links to www.catonmat.net/artikle when they wanted to link to www.catonmat/article. I’d simply insert an entry to 301 redirect /artikle to /article and everyone’s happy.
Everyone's happy? I think not. What you've just done is taken on the the onus for fixing other people's mistakes. In the long run, that's not sustainable-- it's more work for you, and only encourages sloppiness on their part. It's not a road I'd like to go down, I'll tell you that.
47. Add A Job Board.
As my site is getting more popular and popular among programmers, it may be a good idea to add a job board. Joel Spolsky made a million $ in a year with job boards. As the popularity of my site increases, I might make a few dollars out of it as well.
The value (and revenue) from a job board is not linear-- if your site gets 5% of the traffic that Joel gets, your job board is not going to have 5% of the value. In fact, until your site is extremely popular, a job board has almost no value whatsoever. It takes a critical mass.
Catonmat's a great site, btw-- I really dig your content. And that's why I'd hate to see you putting your energy into low-value, high-effort activities like the aforementioned, instead of concentrating on the core: producing good content.
- parenthesis 17y agoThe 404 page resulting from a request for www.catonmat/artikle could say "did you mean: www.catonmat/article".
- pkrumins 17y agoThis is an awesome idea. Wrote it down. :) But I will want to correct that URL transparently to the user if I know what it should be. It doesn't happen too often. I could even automate some of the patterns. One of them is when you put your link in parantehsis like this (www.domain.com/path), some regular expressions include the trailing ) in the path and the resulting URL is 404. This can be fixed automatically by dropping trailing ')'s.
- pmjordan 17y agoIf you can get a complete list of valid URLs, you can try to fuzzy-match the URL against that. If one real URL scores much better than all others, you can redirect, otherwise provide a 404 with a choice of the top matches. I'm not sure automatically redirecting from incorrect URLs is within the HTTP spirit, however.
- pkrumins 17y agoGood idea. I wrote this one down as well!
- tjr 17y agoIn addition to the above fuzzy-matching idea, you could also do something similar to Wikipedia, and for redirected pages, included a notice at the top like: Redirected from catonmat.net/artikle ...to let the user know that they did not type in the most preferred URL, so hopefully they will correct their mistake in the future.
- pkrumins 17y agoAlso a great idea. Thanks!
- pkrumins 17y agoThanks for the feedback. About the 301 redirects - it doesn't take much effort. People don't make mistakes too often, but when they do I wouldn't like to lose visitors that came from their link. I have currently fixed a few links that I have noticed via URL rewriting, but it's web server specific, and I want to brink it to application level to have all the site configuration centralized from admin menu. Managing this tiny feature won't take much of my time and I will still be able to produce quality articles. About the job board. Oh, didn't think of that. You are right. I will set this idea a lower priority and just keep producing good content until I hit critical mass. :)
- michael_dorfman 17y agoPersonally speaking, my biggest complaint about your site is that the Lecture Notes you publish are for courses I have already taken online-- I only wish you had gotten there first. Damned space-time continuum!
- pkrumins 17y agoOh no... /o\ When did you take take these courses?
- michael_dorfman 17y agoI did them both about 2 years ago. I didn't take any organized notes, I'm afraid-- I'd have been happy to pass them along if I had. If you're going to continue following in my footsteps, I suppose the UC Berkeley Operating Systems course and Knuth's "Musings" series will be next up.
- pkrumins 17y agoYou're right. Next up is Knuth's "Musings". :)