avatar Kisaragi Hiu

Why I shouldn't have put the publish date in my URLs

Two philosophies:

  • Date in URL: each page is like a snapshot in time, pages are more like public diary entries / blog posts
  • Just the title or an ID: each page is like an encyclopedia entry. The site is more like a personal wiki.

The former is good for logs, but not that good for concept notes. What if you want to update your understanding of the concept?

Concept entries should use the latter.

I shouldn't have put the date in all of my URLs because this site is more like a personal wiki and not a public diary.

There are some entries that are more akin to diary entries, and those are the ones that should remain dated.

Another alternative is to write new versions and link previous versions to them. But this requires too much manual linking, which makes modifying existing ideas more cumbersome.

Archiving old versions

  • Move the old version to content/archive/<URL>/<timestamp-or-date>.org
  • Add #+archive: <URL> to the old version

Now archive/<URL>.html should show a list of old versions.

Still to do:

  • “Updated: <date>” should link to archive/<URL>.html
  • archive/<URL>.html should explain that you're looking at a list of old versions

  • An old version should explain that it's an old version and offer a link to

    • archive/<URL>.html (the list of old versions), and
    • the current version

But implementing this as a taxonomy seems sound.

URLs without dates: what about the history?

The reader loses the ability to see the history of the page.

Solution

  1. Relying on the Wayback Machine and other caches

    • The reader is expected to know about those services
    • This should only be a backup in case my site goes down

  2. Git log

    • Relies on user knowing enough about Git to browse through the history (or whatever forge one might be using, in my case GitHub)
    • Finicky if I rename files, hard to migrate to from my current setup

  3. Dated versions of pages

    • eg. on Wikipedia (MediaWiki), each page has a history for every change

    • Ideally:

      • example.com/<page>/ = latest
      • example.com/<page>/20210604: version at 2021-06-04

      • example.com/<page>/20200309T123456+0900: version at 2020-03-09T12:34:56+0900

        • Using shortened ISO 8601 as colons are not well supported in file systems
      • How do I do this in Hugo? (Technical limitation)

    • What I'll probably end up doing:

      • example.com/<page> is the latest version
      • example.com/archive/<page>/20200309T123456+0900 is the version at 2020-03-09T12:34:56+0900
      • example.com/archive/<page>/ contains a list of previous versions as well as a link back to example.com/<page>
      • Each page links to example.com/archive/page for old versions
      • Every page under blog/ redirected to their latest versions at the new location
      • archive can be a Taxonomy while each page exists as a Term under it

Dated URLs still have their place

They are good for logs. A public diary, relevant to the day

Citing articles that change?

As far as I know, citation generally requires a date.

Personally I've been using the publication date in my private notes. But articles can change a lot.

Hopefully if I maintain a history of my pages, citing my pages will be like citing Wikipedia: you can just point to a permalink and use the update time of that version.