Keith Devens .com - Weblog: Possible permalinks

Tuesday, January 6, 2004

Possible permalinks

I think weblog URLs should all have a date and a slug to identify their content. For instance, the URL for this post is http://keithdevens.com/weblog/archive/2004/Jan/06/permalinks

Now, weblog URLs should always have the date in the URL. But in the absence of a slug, what's are good ways to uniquely identify a post? Possibilities include:

A timestamp of the creation time, in hour/minute/second format
A timestamp of the creation time, in Unix timestamp format
An arbitrary unique ID for the post (usually just the primary key of whatever table stores your weblog entries)
A GUID (some news sites use this for article IDs)
A number indicating the order the post was posted in the day (first post is 1, etc.) I suppose you could do a textual representation of this as well ("one","two","forty-seven")
Some serialization of the title, if one exists
What else?

Permalink | 1 Comment | Tags: This website | id 4625

18:04 (utc-5)
edited: 18:20 (utc-5)

Comments

In my home grown system we decided to go with year/month/date originally (hey, it was back in the 1990's) and we later updated to doing year/month/date/hour/min/secs, so a month gets this '200401.html' and a day gets this '200401.html#01072004' and an entry gets this '200401.html#01072004072340'

It's not the cleanest, but I do prefer to use the date/time than some arbitrary id number assigned by a system I might migrate away from someday...

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