Dave's Mess > Blog

Oooooh, shiny !

Last night I put my mind to making prettier URLs and now I have them. "What's a pretty URL?" I hear you ask. (Actually, "What's a URL?") A URL is the line of text you have to type in to your browser near the top to bring up this web page. It probably looks like "http://ladadadada.dyndns.org/blog/2006/10/06" but in the not so distant past, it looked like "http://ladadadada.dyndns.org/blog/?date=1159085547". Why is the new version prettier ? Well, 2006/10/06 is much easier to remember than 1159085547. It's the same number of characters but the new version means something. They're also much easier for people to manipulate; say you wanted my blog entry from yesterday, just change the 2006/10/03 to 2006/10/02. With the old method, you'd have to subtract 86400 from 1159085547 and hope that I posted the blog entry at the exact same second of the same minute of the same hour one day ago.

I think I'll add a month thingy so that you can just type 2006/09 to get all of the posts from September 2006. Also, search engines such as Google prefer URLs that don't have "?" in them.

For all you TBL fans out there, don't worry, my old URIs still work. I even stuck in some rewrite rules so that old sections that no longer exist will still take you to the nearest equivalent or provide you with a custom error message explaining why you can't find what Google said was on my site.

So, enough geekery! The next installment of this blog will be the second half of the Great Croatian Adventure in which Jane and I attempt to leave Croatia and return to our homes.