Design of this site

Looking at gwern.net/design, I realized I have things to say too.

URLs shouldn't be too short

  • Look at the link sive.rs/su – what is this monstrosity of a web address? No contextual information. If it had been named https://sive.rs/short-urls, I could recognize it as a page I've read before: "ah yeah, that's that page Sivers wrote about short URLs". With the ultra-short variant, I have to visit it before I can recognize that I've already been there and go back to wherever I was.
    • Sivers would respect my time better if the URL gave enough info for me to avoid clicking it! There's a design criterion.
    • Even qntm.org/destroy is not a link I can recognize on sight. Single-word slugs are usually a bad idea, though gwern.net/design is OK. It strains the limits of my pattern-matcher, but it matches.
      • For that particular page, the top domain gwern.net/... luckily contributes to the meaning, as the page is literally about the design of gwern.net, not about design in general.
      • A year from now, I might not recognize it, but it's night and day compared with qntm.org/destroy, which takes me only an hour to forget. In the time I've been drafting this article I've been largely unaware of just what article that links to – I visit a few times for curiosity, but the association between the generic verb "destroy" and that article fades so quickly. "Qntm destroy what?" It doesn't complete to anything like a sentence.
      • The ideal slug is seen in URLs like www.greaterwrong.com/posts/x4dG4GhpZH2hgz59x/joy-in-the-merely-real, if we ignore for a moment the superfluous bits and bobs like the /posts/x4dG4GhpZH2hgz59x/ and the www. I prefer to handle links such as this. It's many years ago I visited this link, yet even after all that time, it's impossible to mistake. That feature, recognizability, trumps any length aesthetic.
        • Takeaway: slugs should be long and specific, maximizing recognizability.
    • You should have to click links as little as possible (my site is a rat's nest of hyperlinks only as far as it must be). The same theory underlies people like Gwern's efforts to contextualize links and generate preview pop-ups. I say, it helps a lot just having a descriptive URL in the first place.

Permanent page ID🔗

  • My URLs get a unique random ID before the descriptive slug, i.e. domain.com/ID/slug, giving me full freedom to rename the slug part and split and merge pages. I couldn't live without that; almost all my pages have been renamed at least once, and some have been through a dozen renames.
    • When writing the notes for yourself only, it is possible to rely on a mass-renaming toolkit such as what orgrr provides. However, that does not keep alive your blog visitors' bookmarks.
      • To keep them alive, the toolkit would have to keep a record of all renames ever done, that you can translate into URL redirects…
    • My page ID is five alphabetic characters, sans vowels, all lowercase.
      • Example: edstrom.dev/lfqtr/design-of-this-site
      • This implies a 21-character alphabet, or "base-21". Out of that alphabet, there are 4,084,101 ways to compose a five-char string, plenty for one person's homepage (How long page-IDs?).
        • The probability of collision is low but not effectively zero like with a proper UUID, but here's an advantage of a one-person one-machine system – when a collision occurs, I can just renew the ID.
      • Excluding vowels prevents accidentally generating words (and obscenities). It means I can have custom routes such as domain.com/login without worrying that there already exists an autogenerated ID "login".

      • Old mistake: Instead of alphabetic, it used to be base-62 i.e. the ID could include numbers and capital letters. I had links like edstrom.dev/m99K and edstrom.dev/0dSJ.

        Use lowercase alphabetic! It nods to the fact that URLs are a user interface!

        Sometimes I want to send myself a link between devices, but I have to stop and think how to do that. (Do I email myself? Do I use the Share button?) If the URL is short, it's almost always faster and more comfortable to just type it. Right?

        Here base-62 comes into the picture and tramples my lawn, because phone keyboards—

Created (7 months ago)
Updated (3 months ago)