As you might notice, I ignore human-readable URLs in favour of short URLs in my projects.

My argumentation is simple: I don’t want to think of human-readable slugs, and I don’t want my posts links to be long. Also, I think my URLs are less likely to be changed.

I like the URL example.org/2024/11/06/1940/ instead of e.g. example.org/2024/11/06/Oh-Wow,-Mac-Minis-Are-Cheap-These-Days! or whatever it should become with this title. Maybe, you can publish it without a date, e.g. example.org/Oh-Wow,-Mac-Minis-Are-Cheap-These-Days!. But sometimes I just want to have the very same Title URL in my blog. E.g. What ‘I’m doing now’ series of stories.

Or ‘How I designed my Resume’:

• Making My Very First Résumé in 2017
• How I Designed My Résumé in 2022
• How I Redesigned My Résumé in 2022
• How I Designed My Résumé in 2024

Technically, they’re different, as I’ve came up with adding the year to their titles. But there are could be the very same topics differentiated by the date.

Most times there are no duplicates, but that’s not my primary excuse, to be honest.

But the point is, I just don’t want to think about it. What if there’s a misprint in the URL? E.g. this link: https://rubenerd.com/a-bsd-pserson-trying-alpine-linux/

• ‘A BSD pserson trying’ changed to ‘A BSD person tries’, but the URL stays the same. While generally the URL can stay as it is, with the misprint and different title, I don’t like this for my blog.

Yes, from my links you cannot understand what’s there, if you see only the name of the URL. Which Open Graph Protocol to me. But even if there’s no rich information for the URL, and you see it in the text, why would you want to always read that URL? No, really. Why would you? There are plenty of short URLs in our daily lives and we just don’t care.

Same with my blog. For some too-often links, I may add an alias, but I’m not sure I’d like to keep this overhead. I added links to my permanent URLs, those you can see in my menu:

• Now is now
• About is about
• Projects is projects
• Portfolio is portfolio
• Résumé is resume
• Stories is stories

But these links aren’t my blog. They stay permanent and I just update (enhance) them over time. Only the now page is different: upon updating it, I’m moving the content to the nows history.

As I have headings for many stories, I think it’s fair that you can use the title’s anchor as the URL, e.g. mywebsite/2017/01/28/1000/#my-ideal-r%C3%A9sum%C3%A9. But you may see that the URL is ugly.

Since I never liked this in blogs, news and other websites that are just heavy on update frequency, I did what I think is right for my blog. This date URL works very well for me, and since those are my resources, they play by the rules I set.

There are projects that benefit from human-readable URLs indeed. Probably those are most projects. But certainly not every single project.

Personally, I like Trello’s system. I have the link with this URL: https://trello.com/c/qBAKogiA/making-my-resume, but it works if the slug is omitted, e.g. https://trello.com/c/qBAKogiA/ is the same link. For me, that’s the ideal combination: it’s either a short link, or a long one, for those you like or need the long links. But in this design, usually you can write whatever you want. E.g. https://trello.com/c/qBAKogiA/making-frappuccino works the same way. So it’s just the short link + whatever is written after it. In this design, probably, I can just add the same function, to just ignore the latest part of the url, so the person, who sends it would have this readable URL.

Although, I myself see no issue with just writing a couple of words yourself, if you’re sending the link to someone.

Not Blogs #

For many websites, I’d prefer a long but readable link.

E.g. compare these two: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/2019/yoshino/biographical/ vs https://bit.ly/3IXH135, they’re both the same link, but the second one is gibberish (you’d have no idea what the link is about), and it also relies on an external service. I had this link stored in my notes. If there’s no bit.ly by the time I revisit the note, say, the year 2035, or the link was just removed by the author, I’ll never get to where it was, what it was. If the 1st link would be changed and there’s no redirect, chances are, I’ll find it again on the very same website, because I have at least some understanding on what the link really is. But that’s not my point. The proper short link could be nobelprize/2019/chemisty or nobelprize/chemistry/2019 or chemistry-2019 or 2019-chemistry, whatever. Although, I won’t say it’s too long either.

Similarities #

• Noticed that XKCD has similar URLs, just numbers. Although, image links are not.