URL aesthetics
Maybe this is just me being weird, but I have pretty strong opinions about the way I like URLs to look. Let’s look at some URLs:
Vimeo has great attention to detail in their UI; part of that is great URLs. No implementation details are visible. It’s obvious what the page is — it’s a watch page for one video on vimeo. Better, the URL is so short that twitter leaves it be which makes me more likely to click on vimeo links (I believe).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRzMhlFZz9I
Not bad from youtube here. Still pretty short and I can see the key parts. I’d like it better if the video id weren’t a parameter so http://www.youtube.com/v/gRzMhlFZz9I would be much nicer.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/218236 and http://www.slate.com/id/2232555/
Newsweek and slate do well here. /id is a short prefix and it’s obvious what the page is.
http://ffffound.com/image/2cc1a600e1b8f1d83611f6cdf2142a1ecb7cc88b
fffound has the right idea, but the key is too long. I know they have a lot of images, but it’s not that many.
http://www.practicalethicsnews.com/practicalethics/2009/09/academic-freedom-isnt-free.html#more or http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/01/why-are-women-so-unhappy/
Blogs are frequently awful at this. Superlong, repetitive, who cares about the date, who cares about reading the subject — my eyes aren’t even going to get that far. Booo.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/19/world/middleeast/19iran.html?ref=global-home
Nytimes is awful. Date is needless, two keyword, implementation details spilled everywhere. Boo.
It’s true that keywords in the url influence search rankings a little (see the yt video above) so I can understand putting an optional slug at the end like hypem does:
http://hypem.com/#/track/935285/Birdman+-+More+Milli+Feat+Drake+NO+DJ+
but I’d rather that not be there because it’s so ugly.
What about www? I personally like the no-www style like http://rc3.org/, but non-techie people use the www as a cue that it’s a URL so I can deal with it.
So our URLs here on stuckk.net are OK, but we could do better by dropping the /post/
