dw_suggestions | Pretty URLs

What about entries with edited dates?

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.

Option 3 makes for the least breakage and failure, I think.

You're right.

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

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

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.

I'm not fond of the URL text remaining even though the content changed. I mean, you could have said something wrong, be corrected, edit that in your subject, and the wrong statement remains in the URL. Or you are careless, title a post with a spoiler, feel the wrath of the spoiled, hurriedly edit the post, yet your URL still spoils everyone when they see it.

All true, but I'm also not a fan of broken links, especially given I use automated services to aggregate my posts in many places, some of which don't update much subsequently (unfortunately).

If edits can be redirected, brilliant, if not, make sure they're editable separately, not on every edit of subject line (and I'm incredibly prone to typoes, even when I proofread, so it'll really matter for me).

And yes, you're thinking spoiler, I'm actually thinking of UK libel law, but same principle, you do need to be able to change URLs, but not automatically per typo.

Well, after the clarifications in the comments, I changed my mind from "no opinion" to against. I've always been happy to have the simple numerical URLs anyway, so I don't need this, but if these prettified URLs became the default it seems like there'd be a lot of trouble for me, in that my links could break if I didn't want the wrong subject represented (or look stupid with typos remaining), not to mention the hassle of having to edit another thing manually.

Maybe if you could disable them for your journal and just have the regular URLs, with no prettified URLs at all.

Ah, reread, I see it's presented as a default always on, I want it as an option on a per-journal basis, so I'm changing my vote to with changes.

I really want this, until we've got proper domain mapping and this, DW isn't a platform I can actively promote as being better than Blogger and Wordpress for the people I want to promote it to (ie my friends within party politics blogging).

You need pretty links for policy blogging because it works a lot better with search engines, and that's really important for this sort of thing, at the moment DW scores lowly for search, whcih for many users is an unthought of benefit, but for me it's a known about disadvantage, and I want to have the option to make it an advantage.

I want it as an option on a per-journal basis

+1. Possibly 'per-post' as well.

I could accept this on a per-journal basis but am strongly against it being across-the-board.

What if it redirected automatically? (my option 3, up-thread)

That would be better, but I'd still rather have this as option, with the default remaining what it is. Another thing I wonder about is how this would work if the subject line was in a non-latin language.

Are these URLs possible for subject lines in all languages? And how does linking then work? I know I sometimes have trouble with the c&p of characters for which I didn't configure my system. Could I still link to a post in a language I haven't set up on my system, because I like the images posted in it?

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.

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.

Good point re: outboundlink.

To clarify for anyone who might not understand the issue.

Let's say I make a locked post called "Why I hate Person X" and in that locked post I link to a website of Person X's where they're doing something hateful. The URL for my post includes something like /2010/07/16/why-i-hate-person-x.

When Person X looks at their web server logs, or analytics/statistics on where their visitors are coming from, they'll be able to see that people are clicking through from my post with that name, and they'll know I hate them. Previously, all they could see was "12345.html" so they know I said *something* about them, but not what. If they followed the link back, they'd see the "You are not authorized to view this protected entry" page.

What about a general privacy setting:
-- prettify the URLs of all my entries
-- only prettify the URLs of my public posts (could a post which is made private later on have its URL rewritten to anonymous everywhere? Edit: everywhere on the site I mean not on third-party sites but I think you know what you're doing when you post potentially offensive posts in public)
-- never prettify the URLs of my entries (the default)

And a setting when you post. The same way it works for comment screening.

Edited 2010-07-16 15:44 (UTC)

I like.

Oh! Worth a separate suggestion, but I'm writing it down here so in case I forget (likely): add nofollow to links in non-public posts, as a ticky somewhere on the back end.

I don't think this can have any effect at all. The nofollow attribute is an indicator to search engines that this link may not be reliable. Search engines will only ever have access to public posts. Putting an instruction to search engines on a page they can never see ... I wouldn't put that anywhere on a list of priorities.

Setting nofollow attributes in public posts is more plausible, though I would argue against that idea, too. I'd interpret such a setting as "this journal does not have confidence in its own links", as it's posting links that it simultaneously endorses (by posting them) and repudiates (by declaring nofollow). It's only a short step from there to "I do not have confidence in this journal."

Good point re: nofollow not serving to obscure the referer. I wonder if there is another referer-obscuring technique that could be offered as an option? Perhaps a paid feature?

I've got a suggestion in the queue about that -- the done thing seems to be with a redirect.

Yeah, I was barking up the wrong terminology tree there. I instead meant to make the referrer data betray less information about the source, if not completely anonymized.

Regarding nofollow, though, "I do not have confidence in this journal" is a bit of a longer step for me, particularly given the case of snarkbloggers, who only link a thing to make a mockery of it.

I like this idea.

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.

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.)

+1

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....

Also liking this.

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.)

Edited (add additional suggestion) 2010-07-16 15:48 (UTC)

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.

Oh, I agree on the context element -- I just thought from a technical/implementation perspective, it might be easier if some part of it was tied into the hard-coded system-generated unique ID instead of a date that could be user-modified infinitely.

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

+1

+1 absolutely! I was going to vote against but took the point about wanting to be visible to search engines. For privacy reasons, though, opt in definitely.

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.

This

Sounds like a thing for the new edit page.

I'm now seeing a thing where there is, in whatever settings thing, a field to put in the slug, which gets auto-updated whenever the date/title change, *until* it's manually changed (a la the LJ magic updating date) at which point it is static with a series of radio buttons that includes an "insert my own slug" (though that's a term that might need a more descriptive name for the UI) so one can unset that and .

Upon detecting a locked entry, or an entry that will be locked based on default privacy settings, it is not auto-updated, and the "use automatically assigned entry number" option is selected.

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.)

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.

Ah! That makes much sense. Thank you.

Not a lot of sense, since for a long time you could see the existence of locked entries in the calender views, but lj sense.

(Though paging through my journal with that thought in mind, it looks more like "number-of-last-entry plus a random number between 1 and 256"? )

Right, right, plus not times. Sorry!

Hmmm. What if it became http://myjournal.dreamwidth.org/12453.html?detail=2010/05/15/waah-life-is-hard?

This looks to a non-techy user as if the link contains the date and title (and it sort of does), but a techy user will recognize it as a top-level post with some parameters. The site could easily ignore the 'detail' field altogether, so the original URL would work, the URL would work if the date changed, the URL would work if I decided to type http://myjournal.dreamwidth.org/12453.html?detail=no-really-i-hate-this-feature.... Heh.

Doesn't help with googleability for those who want it, as google largely ignores HTTP parameters (the stuff after the question mark).

Would http://myjournal.dreamwidth.org/12345/2010-05-15-waah-life-is-hard avoid that problem and still be workable?

Yes, it would.

TBH, I personally can do without the date, other than the small advantage that the end URL can be hacked off to take you to an archive page. Which this stops.

But the post URL with another / after it would be perfectly good for SEO and most usability purposes.

I'd still rather have it follow the date format for archive views, which is good for usability (remember when Browsers had inbuilt up buttons?), but not essential.

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.

Very good point.

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.

I didn't think of that but yes, there must definitely be a standard URL format.

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.

What's the point of "pretty" urls?

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

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).

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

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?

Pretty URLs

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