Pretty URLs

[damned_colonial]

Title:
Pretty URLs

Area:
entries

Summary:
Generate a pretty URL for each entry in a journal, so that instead of:

http://some-journal.dreamwidth.org/12345.html

you see:

http://some-journal.dreamwidth.org/2010/07/15/five-things-make-a-post

Description:
The generated URL should include the date in YYYY/MM/DD format, and a simplified version of the post's subject line. If two posts with the same subject happen in one day, just add "2" to the end of the second one (and increment as necessary).

The original numeric URLs should keep working so that links don't break, but should rewrite to the pretty ones.

This will provide context in all kinds of handy situations, eg. when someone pastes a URL to you or when you hover over a link, you can see what's likely to be at the other end of it.

Poll #3836 Pretty URLs

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 90

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
29 (32.2%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
22 (24.4%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
31 (34.4%)

(I have no opinion)
8 (8.9%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[ninetydegrees]

What about entries with edited dates?

[damned_colonial]

For changes to both dates and subjects, the three options seem to be:

1) only the original works
2) only the new one works
3) the new one is canonical, and the old one redirects to then new one

Option 3 makes for the least breakage and failure, I think. I think option 2 is closest to how Wordpress does it (Wordpress was my model for the URL layout, and the one I'm most familiar with). Option 1 would be a very bad idea IMHO.

[ratcreature]

How would edited subject lines work? Are these all going to be redirected?

[damned_colonial]

I replied above to 900degrees who asked a similar question.

[matgb]

Wordpress and Blogger now work that the original URL is set on first post and future edits don't change it, and WP now allows you to edit it (and even set it originally) separately.

Which I think works well.

[damned_colonial]

Huh. Just thought of a possible (small?) privacy implication. If someone linked to a locked post that you don't have access to, you'd have slightly more information about that post than you currently do. OTOH, people don't often do this (since most people won't be able to follow the link, and what's the point?) and if they do link to a locked post (by accident or design) they usually provide some context anyway via link text, surrounding description, etc., so the change is not very significant imho.

Example:

Person A posts, "someone posted a great rant about broccoli the other day."

Person B comments, "Um, locked post!"

Person A says "oops", edits post, but you already know that the post was by someone, and that it was a rant about broccoli. Knowing the URL /2010/07/16/aauuuugh-fscking-broccoli won't make much difference.

[matgb]

It should be an option on a per-journal basis (definitely not per post although you could have default and override I guess).

But there are definitely privacy concerns, in a bigger way to my concerns about LJ, outboundlink and locked posts, but in the same ball park.

If you know it's happening, and want it to happen, then it's up to you to make sure you're doing it right. Allowing it to be turned off on a per-post basis is probably a good compromise.

(my with changes is to not put the day of the month in the URL, just year and month should be enough)

And for some reason I thought this was already a planned feature, it's definitely been discussed in the past, otherwise I'd have suggested it with my last batch, definitely in favour, really want it, it'll make the difference, for the way I use DW, of DW being cool and DW being incredibly effective as a platform.

And when it switches to incredibly effective, I actively start recruiting people.

[kyrielle]

Also, what do notifications for "so-and-so has posted" look like? I don't use them, but if they include the link, then if so-and-so didn't mean the post to be public (or visible to that group or whatever) and hastily takes it private, that could leave the people who got the notification more information than they'd otherwise have. In some cases, the drama llama might get to dance all over the place from that one.

[shaela]

This has been at the top of my wish list since I created my journal. But there are a couple of things I’d add:

1. I’d want people to be able to decide for themselves how they want their URLs to look. Some people might want to keep them the way they are. Others might want the year and the month in the URL, but not the day. (Ideally, this would be part of the wizard.)

2. I’d want a separate field for the entry’s slug (the word or words that are in the URL). That way, if someone wants to give one of their entries a ridiculously long title, they can still give it a short URL. (If they left the slug field blank, the URL could still fall back on the title.)

[axiom_of_stripe]

+1

[aithine]

+1

[green_grrl]

+1

[calime]

+1

[kerravonsen]

+1

[kyrielle]

Oh, I LIKE this variation. And for #1 also let them pick just the post id (as it is today) and you've got all the options....

[azurelunatic]

Also liking this.

[aliya]

I'd like to echo suggestions both to make the pretty URL an opt-in, and to take the day-of-the-month out of the pretty URL. But another option I can see is to make the pretty URL option closer to Tumblr's: they give users the option to name the pretty URL on a post-by-post basis. I'm not sure how much more complicated it is from a technical standpoint (I'd imagine quite a bit), but for privacy & security reasons might be worth the extra development work to implement.

ETA: perhaps, rather than having the date in the "pretty URL," the system-generated entry number in the original URL could be the unique identifier before the user-named option? I think that, too, may be how Tumblr does it (there's always a number before whatever you name it, though IDK if it's actually random or not)...

(If you couldn't tell, the pretty URLs is a feature of Tumblr's -- one of the few -- that I really like.)

[damned_colonial]

The benefit to dates is that they provide additional context: "oh, that's an old post" or whatever. Quite often I see people link to older posts and click through and go "oh, I remember this, I've read it before" -- which I might have remembered earlier if I'd seen the date and subject.

[turlough]

My "with changes" is that this only be implented as an opt-in.

[sorchasilver]

+1

[ursamajor]

If this goes through:

1. I would TOTALLY use it.
2. It would be much better motivation for me to provide actual subject lines. ;)

I grok the small privacy issues, and would probably be more comfortable with URL-prettifying being opt-in, and I don't know how difficult it would be to make this work, but overall, I would love to see this implemented.

[firecat]

This

[melannen]

I am trying to work through why I hate this idea so much, and I think the main reason is that I really, really don't like the idea of the site having lots of automatic redirects so that three or four different URLs could lead to the same post. Sites that do that (and I include several popular blogging platforms in that) really reduce usability for me.

And also I dislike URLs with lots of unnecessary subdirectories and hidden info; I have to say that myjournal.dreamwidth.com/342564.html looks a lot prettier to me that myjournal.dreamwidth.com/2010/05/15/waah-life-is-hard . The first one tells me it's a simple HTML file that's top-level in the myjournal subdomain, and if I want to type it manually all I have to do is remember the journal name and a short numeric string. The second one could be *anything*, is harder to precisely remember and complicated to type. (why, yes, I am a fossil whose internet habits are stuck in the '90s.)

And yet if you made it opt-in, I'd still want there to be a standard URL format that worked on all posts across the site, because a DW where some journals used the numeric string and some used the ugly "pretty" version and I had to remember which would be even worse.

(Isn't there a way to stick with a simple 12453.html filename but make it more meaningful? 2010515-waah-life.html still encodes the date info and a title hint while keeping the url simpler and shorter. Or you could make the post numbers just increment up; I've never been terribly fond of the current numbering system, which appears to be a combination of linear time since journal creation and tiromancy.)

[denise]

which appears to be a combination of linear time since journal creation and tiromanc

It's "entry-in-journal-number, times a random number between 1 and 256", to keep people from immediately realizing when there's an entry they can't see.

[eosrose]

I've never liked this only other sites, so I'm going to have to say "no." What's the point of "pretty" urls? They've always struck me as long and bulky.

[denise]

What's the point of "pretty" urls?

Search engine optimization -- search engines give more juice to entries whose URLs describe what's in them.

[inalasahl]

I think the "ugly" URLs look prettier, and I don't want my journal optimized for search engines anyway (if I could lock the whole thing to registered users, I would).

[briarwood]

Ugh. No, no, no. Why replace a short URL with a long one? Nothing 'pretty' about that. It would be irritating as hell.

[bnewman]

Because the long one has meaning to a human being? Faced with the URL of one of your own posts from a year ago, would you recognize which post it was from the number alone?