Comments on: Top 3 reasons to use clean URLs

By: AndroidIQ

AndroidIQ — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

What … no mention of
mod_rewrite?

By: Jeff

Jeff — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

nice little comment, but it would have been nice if you had included at least a snippet of the modrewrite rule(s) you are using. :)

PS> are you from NY, Jersey, or neither?

By: Richard Crowley

Richard Crowley — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Clean URLs are the future (and should have been the past). While mod_rewrite is nice, I find a different approach to solve this problem and kill one potential server bottleneck: Make your CMS (or whatever exactly you want to call it) write static HTML pages. Only overwrite those pages when the content changes (i.e. a new post or a comment). Since page views are more common than page changes, building the HTML on changes makes more sense than building the HTML on views. Plus you can actually create the nice directory structure that your clean URLs hint at!

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Dope. Dope. Dope.

Wow. Excellent use of the word dope. But you forgot other stupid slang. Like, you should use mackin’ URLs. And this URL is word to your mother. Or this URL is funky fresh.

By: Till

Till — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Mod_rewrite is Apache specific, but yeah, “rewrite rules” in general can do a lot. One should take into account that they can be pretty intense on the serverside.

I heard “talking URLs” are pretty good for SEO as well, anyone got more info on that?

By: centernetworks

centernetworks — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

NYC – Go Yankees!

By: Jon Haddad

Jon Haddad — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

The easiest way to do this is in apache is with Multiviews.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

1. When you see someone on the street and want to give them the URL to your site … it better be a domain name, period. Anything more will be too long/no worth the effort to write down. This is not an argument.

2. Search engine optimization is a complex topic that has a lot more to it than ‘keeping clean’ your URLs.

3. There are legitimate reasons for using complex URLs, such as backwards compatibility, cookieless sessions, etc.

Really, none of the arguments you present take anything more than aesthetics into account.

By: Happysin

Happysin — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

You say that like aesthetics don’t matter. They matter greatly in the real world.

Also note he explicitly mentioned “Not just search engine optimization” thus making your counterargument 2 worthless.

By: fazi

fazi — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been doing this in my website, my first reason is for SEO. I find that creating static page ‘html’ using dynamic programming langguage are effective. The static page are dynamic but it’s still static for user and search engine :)

By: Todd Stossels

Todd Stossels — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Ya! Mod_Rewrite is great; heres an article I found from Google: http://www.allsyntax.com/tutorials/Apache/21/Mod_Rewrite-URLs-for-Search-Engines/1.php

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Hackability is just as important. Predictable, hackable URL schemes invite intelligent re-use of web resources – both for regular web sites and web service APIs. ‘Don’t make me think’, all that. :)

By: centernetworks

centernetworks — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Ed - I can't say that I disagree with you, but at the same time, I am not crazy about adding the date to a url. To me it can be a good thing and a bad thing... It can make people think "this content is out of date, I am not even going to visit that link" and from that standpoint it is a negative.

Of course your reasoning is very valid as a site grows. I can only hope that CN will eventually outgrow its url conventions. But with n² possibilities, I don't see that happening too quickly.

But I will talk about it with the team to see if it makes sense here.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Could you setup a system where the url after the domain is actualy a search term? Say I was looking for this article, instead of having to exactly match the url I could enter http://www.domain.com/clean+url. If there was one match, show it, if more, then show a list of options.

By: Ed Davies

Ed Davies — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

…it is imporant to create a structure that will work today and in the future….

Include some of the date in the URL so then you can reorganise and keep compatibility while still keeping the URLs pretty clean. E.g.:

http://www.centernetworks.com/2006/10/top-3-reasons-to-use-clean-urls

Because you only have to be unique within the month you can also abbreviate a bit more:

http://www.centernetworks.com/2006/10/clean-urls