Short, Human Friendly, Permalinks
Posted by Chris Roos Tue, 27 Nov 2007 09:31:00
I was recently asked for my Amazon wishlist. I wasn’t able to use email and was expected to write down the URL. I had a look and found that the URL (http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/registry/IO9HVNCPEWGD) wasn’t paper or speech friendly. Instead of attempting to convey this URL, I used the opportunity to create my own human friendly permalink for my wishlist (chrisroos.co.uk/amazonwishlist). I actually started with a hyphenated variant (amazon-wishlist) but realised that the non-hyphenated version would be easier for someone to understand in conversation.
This seems to tie in with what Dave Winer has been talking about recently.
I think this’d be quite a neat, and fairly easy, little webapp to build. It would need a simple interface for managing permalinks and the ability to work with multiple domains. Hmm, I’m tempted to give this a shot unless anyone knows of anything similar already out there?
Legacy Comments
Trackbacks
-
From deferred until inspiration hits on Fri, 07 Dec 2007 07:59:58
More on those friendly URLs
So, not being able to sleep does have some benefits. I managed to get started on my latest little pet project. I had been using apache and mod_rewrite to redirect “chrisroos.co.uk/amazonwishlist” to my actual wishlist. I had something ...
Paul Battley said on Tue, 27 Nov 2007 12:54:15:
It wouldn’t be too hard to make hyphenation optional, and to redirect to the canonical version.
The BBC do something clever with their URLs, actually: many of them are communicated by being read out over the air, so they are short and sweet and handle ambiguity: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/ is canonical; http://www.bbc.co.uk/radiofour/ redirects to radio4. (And of course, http, www, and trailing slashes are dealt with higher up the application stack.)
They don’t handle hyphens, however. Maybe they should.