I’ve read Cool URIs Don’t Change and recognize the validity of the principle: make a URI scheme that is robust enough to not change as site organization changes.
I also recognize that nobody is going to care about my URLs as much as I do. By thinking about it as long as I have, I have given it 100× the thought any other human being will.
But! I keep going back and forth with myself about what I want my permalink paths to be. I’m expecting to categorize my posts by different kinds (writing for articles, notes, reads, links, etc.), and I’m trying to decide if I want them to have unique paths (/writing/hello-world/, /read/the-hobbit), or use something more generic (/note/[hash] for most non-article posts, for instance).
I’m curious: what permalink scheme did you end up on for your site, and how did you decide on it?
Slugs. And the URL slugs of posts double as an alternate title. Nothing too fancy, just “domain/slug”.
It makes things simpler in a multitude of ways, less characters = less real estate; everything is still straight-forward, and posts have their own flavor.
If you want to go for something more complex, you could always refactor later if you want to go another direction with URL forwarding. You just need to figure out what the scheme is now, that way if it ever changes, the refactor is straight-forward. I think the idea you have would work fine enough; the only thing holding you back now is overthinking it.
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I pretty much agree with HisVirusness RE overthinking it. And the page you linked sums it up nicely too:
Things are only going to change if you change them (presuming you’re not using a site builder that dictates your URL scheme) and when you do, you can be mindful to set up links from old pages to their new locations which isn’t as hard as it sounds (often you can just redirect one directory to another).
As long as your old URLs are all still valid and still point to where they need to go, all is well.
My preference as a user is that URLs contain a human-readable hint as to what they link to, so using title slugs with a date included is ideal in my opinion. Plus then when editing your site, you can then tell at a glance if you have pasted the wrong link rather than one of your other note posts.
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